Only slightly bent

For the past two weeks, I’ve spent nearly every waking moment that I’ve been at home scanning photos. I borrowed a great film scanner from our companys photo club with the idea of finally scanning all of my old slides and negatives that have been taken before going mostly digital some years ago.

I thought it’d make a fun one-weekend project.

Yeah, right. Turns out that was a rather naive conception of the momentous task that lay ahead of me. Over the days that followed, I discovered some interesting stuff and learned the following, listed here so that should anyone ever attempt such a thing, you have been warned:

• Never underestimate the number of photos you have. When encasing slides, they go through the process of quality selection at that step, so I thought I only have maybe a few hundred. Wrong.
• Never underestimate the number of important photos that “must” be scanned. With negatives, I thought I could easily skip, say, 80% of them as uninteresting. Again, I was wrong – turns out there are so many priceless and supposedly priceless (=embarrassing) photos from the good old days that I had to scan the vast majority of them.
• Never underestimate the time it takes to scan everything – a good scan takes at least two minutes per photo. That may not sound like much until you have a stack of a couple thousand photos in front of you and you start doing the math..
• What all this means is that if you have lots of photos, don’t even think you can scan them all. Not in a weekend, not in a week, not in a month. It takes a long time.
• Perhaps most surprisingly, never underestimate the amount of disk space the scans will take. A good 4000dpi, 42bpp raw scan yields a 120MB+ file. That also may not sound like much until you’re looking at a folder with 200GB+ of photos in it..
• Think about backups. With 120MB raw-files, the willingness to back up on DVD-Rs dramatically diminishes as your diskspace consumption tops 100 GB. In the end, buying a second (or a third, fourth or whateverth) hard disk may be the best choice.
• Reserve (a lot of) time for some serious post-processing. This is a phase that’s yet to be done for the most part, but it’s clear that while good automagic dust-removal things work magic and save thousands of hours of time, you’re still looking at one heck of a big project of categorization, keywording, rating, rotating, color-correcting, cropping and what-not.

To make a long story short and put it mildly, it’s one tedious process. But it is nice when you’re able to find some good old stuff from the archives that you’ve forgotten about. Also, it was interesting to re-scan some photos that had been scanned earlier by the photo developer – the improvement in image quality is quite amazing.

Now, in order to have some real contents in this post also, here are a few random examples. First, a couple of photos of Noora, my St Bernard from something like 15 years ago. She was one cute and wonderful dog, although you can imagine the amount of drool generated during warm summers.. They’re followed by some stalactites from an Ohio cave, spring in New York City in 2001, St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and a random flower shot. Click the thumbnails to open the entire photo.

I know I’ve probably talked about climate change ad nauseum, but VATT (The Government Institute for Economic Research in Finland) recently contributed what must’ve been the most useless study if not ever, at least this year. They state that the EU goal of cutting emissions by 20% by the year 2020 would lead to the loss of 60,000 jobs in Finland. Who knows, maybe that’s even true. But even so, there’s this one tiny fundamental flaw with the study – that it doesn’t take into account the jobs that would be created at all. Oh, and it also conveniently forgets to mention that we’ll lose much more than 60,000 jobs if we don’t tackle climate change.

One has to wonder a couple of things; first, what kind of hidden agenda (and whose agenda) is behind such “research”? Secondly, did they think they could get away with publishing such completely one-sided stuff without getting caught? Seriously. This is precisely the kind of scaremongering we don’t need. By scaring people (or governments) into inaction by presenting spurious bad outcomes and simultaneously dismissing the reality of a certain, big disaster if action is not taken is really nothing short of irresponsible.

Heck, with the workforce shifting constantly to new areas, one could safely make a categorical prediction that Finland will lose 100,000 jobs in the next ten years if <INSERT YOUR FAVORITE TOPIC HERE> is / is not done. Whatever you put there, it’ll be true simply because of constant change and movement in the workforce.

And if we don’t mention the 100,000 or more jobs created elsewhere, it’ll make a much better headline, won’t it?

I’ve always been quick to adapt to different surroundings and different places. I can call a hotel “home” after spending two nights there. I make it a point to learn my way around and try to blend in to some extent, no matter how short a time I might be staying somewhere. But that is the concept of a home on a smaller, easier scale. It’s easy to find and build a home like that – what’s more difficult is finding the right city, country and most of all, culture, to place it in.

One would think I’d consider Finland my home. And I do, a lot of the time. However, at other times Finland, where I’ve lived for most of my life, feels very foreign. I walk among the people completely incognito, blended in, as one is supposed to. After all, that’s the ultimate test of belonging in Finland – successful cultural integration is being ignored, being just another sulky face walking purposefully and busily down the street – to nowhere special. No one can tell I don’t belong. Yet every person I don’t look in the eyes, every opportunity that I don’t smile at someone, every situation where I choose to remain silent instead of talking – conforming to all of the little things how Finns are supposed to act – feel like little stabs of something being wrong. Something that I shouldn’t but that I have to do.

Have to do? Why? Because whereas a culturally unadjusted (or just different) foreigner is usually understood and even tolerated to some extent, nothing draws fire like a Finn critical of Finland or unwilling to fit in. They are treated as anything from simple weirdos to unpatriotic traitors which they by no means usually are – but since when does rationality play any role in emotions? It’s just that the cultural dogma of uniformity and jealousy, the derogation and fear of anything different, the prohibition on being visibly happy (except from June to August), the political unwillingness to accept and tackle the real issues and the overt abuse of the legal drugs sometimes get to me.

Of course, most of the time I don’t think about it that much. Often I’m even downright happy to be living in Finland, a country that’s still far detached from most of the world’s disasters. Yet I know it’s mostly an illusion that we would be completely out of harm’s way; all it takes is, for example, a simple pandemic to prove it to everyone. It’s highly ironic to see some commentators being glad about e.g. climate change because it’s likely to make living and growing conditions better in Finland. As if we’re the winners or something. (In fact, there have been newspaper articles with that very title, “Finland a winner in climate change“) Do people not realize how interlinked the world already is? Read the “Made In”-tags of all the stuff you own to begin to grasp it. In a globalized world, climate change or any natural or manmade disaster produces no winners. There are only losers.

Since no country is all bliss and no pain, I wonder if this one could be changed to a happier, better, more rational nation. Just like this great despair.com demotivator reminds us of teamwork’s power, perhaps it also works the other way around; in a positive manner.

The first couple of items are rants about recent news, reading which seems to get more and more aggravating.

Finland still head in the sand

And that’s putting is as politely as I can right now. The anger stems from this piece of news. I haven’t heard their arguments behind this braindead decision to be in a small minority in EU against this, but I’m betting it has something to do with appealing to competitive reasons. A little like the US not agreeing to the Kyoto treaty years ago as it would “hurt the economy”. Well that’s just beautiful, because as any enlightened person would know by now, reducing emissions does not need to hurt the economy. Quite the contrary, emissions reduction and fighting climate change creates a vast potential for economic growth! I applaud these companies for sticking to their operations in such a politically hostile country as Finland..

Meanwhile the world experienced the hottest January ever recorded.

Bird flu a “game”?

In another case of ignorance on a stupendous level is a comment from Indonesia’s Health Ministry:

“We cannot share (virus) samples for free. There should be rules of the game for it…“

Umm, a game? A game?! Sharing the virus samples is crucial for H5N1 research and pandemic prevention worldwide and they’re calling it a game.

Well actually now that I think of it, a game does come to mind that resembles this. Russian Roulette. With six bullets.

New Orleans on the way to an abyss?

This is something I have to add to this post after posting; I ran into an interesting article in NY Times about New Orleans. While officials deny the brain-drain, the real story seems to be quite different with many residents having “had enough” and moving away. What’s particularly interesting is that while no official statistics are available, some interesting proxy statistics are telling: the level of mail arriving to the city has leveled of, commercial moving companies are reporting a net loss for New Orleans while U-Haul (the moving method of choice by the less well off people) is reporting slightly more inbound rentals than outbound.

Perhaps not an outright death of a great city, but a sad transformation anyway. All it takes is another hurricane to wipe it permanently off the map.

And then we have a mind-boggling quote from Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans novelist:

“If a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don’t desert it just because it can kill you. There are some things more valuable than life.”

Ehh, umm, oookay.. And that would be what? Maintaining a city even if it kills you? Somehow I don’t quite agree.

Web 2.0, conversational media, user-created content and all that are already old news. However, it’s only in the past year or so that the Finnish “mainstream” media has awoken to the existence of blogs, user-created content and all that.

Lately, I’ve been thinking awoken is the wrong word – exploitation may be better. On the theme of blogs, many magazines, media companies and newspapers (and, lately, increasingly political parties due to the upcoming elections) in Finland have started running a series of blogs written by their staff. Most of these blogs are uninteresting and dumb, with the writers having no idea what blogs are all about. Some have clearly been just told to write a blog without their own motivation.

Then there’s the user-created content part. In most cases with the “old” media, this has come to mean utilizing the readership in usually one of two ways: one option is to set up an open channel (like an SMS number) and then publish readers’ comments on anything and everything – like Uutislehti 100. The other option is to set up a “themed” feedback channel like a discussion forum or a blog with perhaps a short post or a question to arouse comments and views from the readers. Some of the submitted comments are then published in their printed media, like Helsingin Sanomat does.

Whatever the approach, one thing is in common to most; they all take the readers’ comments and use them to fill in their newspaper or magazine or whatever. In some cases, entire columns consist of comments to some author’s blog post or entire pages full of SMS-comments are printed. So if people are clearly willing to do this, what’s the problem?

The problem is it’s clearly profitable contents for their publications but the contributors do not get compensated at all. In the most blatant cases, people are actually paying to get their message on these forums, like the useless SMS forum at Uutislehti 100. To their credit, however, Uutislehti 100 does pay nominal compensation for published readers’ photos, while most other media have graciously started only “accepting” media material from their reader- and viewership. Not a word of compensation.

In essence they’re ripping off their customers by using them – for free – to create the content they are paying for. Would you pay to read or see stuff you made? I didn’t think so.

A recent short Reuters article contains a couple of quite interesting statements. In the article Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, talks about Web TV at the Cable Europe Congress. One of the key messages, referring to distribution of broadcast-quality TV content over the Internet:

“The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect…”

This is a rather curious comment, considering that Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube puts them right on the frontlines of Web TV developments. Would Google expect YouTube’s video quality or content offering to not improve? I somehow doubt that.

So, assuming there will be bandwidth problems at the core (which is already quite an assumption), where to get the extra juice? Already for a couple of years, there has been talk of Google buying massive amounts of dark fiber. What for, nobody knows, but speculation has included stuff like a VoIP backbone. Considering the above comments, could Google be first creating and hyping up and then mercifully offering to solve the problem with their own backbone?

Just a conspiracy-theory-kind of a thought

The Reuters article offers another interesting quote, this one coming from Spanish cable operator ONO’s Chief Executive Richard Alden:

“Most of the IP (Internet protocol or data) traffic is peer-to-peer (file swapping), and most of that is video. Every year we have to invest substantially just to maintain the user experience.

So true – yet not. The user experience of the Internet has changed dramatically over the past years – sure the bandwidth demands are growing and most of it is thanks to P2P traffic, but the user experience is definately not just “maintained”. With more bandwidth new services are enabled and with new services, the experience improves.