Only slightly bent

For certain reasons (or actually one, very small reason), rounding up ten movies for this review batch took significantly longer than usual. Here, finally, is the latest roundup however, no matter how “late” it may be. Again a couple of gems found their way to this batch – for two very different excellent movies, check out The Bourne Ultimatum and Maria Full of Grace.

Lilo & Stitch 2

IMO, Lilo & Stitch is one of the best animated movies of all times. It was so good that after the pseudo-sequel “Experiment 626″ I was a little skeptical on even watching Lilo & Stitch 2, the “official” sequel. The animation and the voices are (at least nearly) as good as in the original, but the plot of Lilo & Stitch 2 is quite straightforward – there’s a problem with Stitch which threatens not only his family relations but his life altogether.. Jumba, Stitch’s creator, must try to find a cure before it’s too late.

Lilo & Stitch 2 does have some funny and moving moments but overall, it’s definitely not as good as the original Lilo & Stitch. Still, it is way better than “Experiment 626″ – a semi-worthy sequel which could’ve been better but could’ve also been a lot worse. 3½ out of 5.

Something New

Something New is, to put it shortly, a comedy about race. Kenya McQueen is a successful African-American lawyer who doesn’t really have a time for a life. A blind date with an architectural landscaper Brian doesn’t go all that smoothly – at first anyway. The primary reason? Color. He doesn’t see a problem with it, but she certainly does. She ends up commissioning him to design her garden anyway and the two end up spending increasing amounts of time together. There’s very little in the plot or the movie that we haven’t seen in other movies, but it works nice enough anyway. Overall an average 3 out of 5.

Knocked up

Knocked Up is a drama/comedy on what will happen – and to many, probably has happened – if you get a little too excited, a little too drunk, with the wrong person and when the repercussions aren’t limited to bad feelings the morning after. You get the drift.

Many critics have hailed Knocked Up as a more realistic romantic comedy – and to a certain degree it is just that. However, I think it’s been stripped of even too much of the “unrealistic” happy stuff and in the process ends up coming across as a somewhat pessimistic movie. There’s some very over-the-top acting especially on the part of the supporting cast. Even the main characters have been made quite, well, simple and black and white. It manages to entertain but also annoy; a good enough movie but not the breakthrough critics think (how come I’m not surprised..) – 3½ out of 5.

Dear Frankie

Frankie is a 9-year old boy living with his mother – his father he communicates with via letters, believing he’s working on a ship. The only thing is that it’s not Frankie’s father who is replying those letters, it’s his mother. The precarious situation is made even more complicated when HMS Accra, the ship his dad is supposed to be on, will soon arrive at the harbor of the town he lives in and Frankie desperately wants to meet his dad.

So what is her mother to do? Hiring a stranger to play his dad may not seem like the appropriate thing to do, but that’s what she does. Dear Frankie is a very warm-hearted movie with a good story and great acting. 4 out of 5.

Bourne Ultimatum

If you can sometimes go to the movies and put your brain on the shelf, not over-analyze things too much, Bourne Ultimatum will hit you like a ton of bricks – in the first few minutes, the restless camera style may seem distracting, but one quickly gets used to it. The movie starts fast and simply flows forward without losing its momentum for even a moment. Still, we’re not talking about an entirely mindless plot and one benefits to some extent from having seen the previous Bourne movies. The Bourne Ultimatum is, IMO anyway, simply as good as action thrillers get. 5-/5.

Little Children

Imagine your normal neighborhood with children; playgrounds get crowded with children and their parents, usually mothers. This seemingly normal setting is the environment for this movie. Throw in some marital problems, a stay-at-home dad and a pedophile to the mix and you instantly have some potential for an interesting plot. Little Children is a somewhat slow-moving drama of loneliness, romance and company – and a little bit of paranoia also. Despite the slowish plot development, this was a very good movie with some great low-key performances. 4 out of 5

The Pursuit of Happyness

Chris is a salesman with a product that doesn’t have that great of a market; problems with income exacerbate problems with his marriage and soon enough he finds himself living only with his son with little money to pay for anything. Together they try to struggle – try to sell the weird machines, try to find a place to sleep, try to get a new job. Finally an opportunity comes knocking in the form of an internship; an internship that is unpaid, creating some extra challenges.

A warm-hearted movie with yet another good performance from Will Smith as well as Jaden Smith (his son as his son). 3½ out of 5.

Breaking and Entering

Will (Jude Law), a landscape architect, sets up his firm in a bit of a shady area of London. Incidentally, the place gets robbed – twice. In the process of figuring things out, Will gets involved with the perpetrator’s mother and becomes quite interested in her.. perhaps even too interested, at least when it comes to his wife and daughter at home. A nice enough thriller but I generally dislike Jude Law’s relatively expressionless acting style and this movie is no exception in that regard. Overall I’d say 3- out of 5.

Mini’s First Time

Mini, a canny teen, is fed up with her drunk mother so she makes plans to get rid of her. To help her in her quest, she seduces her stepfather. The plans, as would be expected, turn a little bit sour and soon there’s a suspecting cop questioning the two. How far will the deceit work before someone has to pay the price?

The movie starts off quite slowly but picks up after about half an hour. The acting isn’t anything to write home about, but it was still another good enough (but certainly not stellar) thriller at 3+ out of 5.

Maria Full of Grace

Quite appropriately taglined “Based on a 1,000 true stories”, Maria Full of Grace focuses on the story of one young Columbian woman. Very few things seem to be going her way in her life – not least the unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend who doesn’t love her. So when an opportunity comes to make a lot of money seemingly easily, she takes it. The only problem is that it involves becoming a drug mule to USA and all the related risks that go along with it..

Maria Full of Grace is a wonderful movie of a subject that’s far from wonderful. It also helps you begin to understand why drug mules accept such dangerous jobs in the first place. Highly recommended – 4½ out of 5.

The rising cost of food has been all over the news in the past few months (e.g. in Finland here, here, here and here). In essence consumers are being told to expect much higher food prices next year. The news articles seem to focus on the fact that grain prices have risen to their all-time high, which they have. However, the reasons offered for this include both imaginary and real reasons.

The real reason(s)

The imaginary reasons include the oft-cited “fact” that crops have massively failed in many parts of the world this year. Incidentally this is a reason that people would easily accept as the cause of higher food prices. Only it’s not true – or at most only partially true; while there are always some crop failures in various places, consider this (via the Economist):

According to the International Grains Council, a trade body based in London, this year’s total cereals crop will be 1.66 billion tonnes, the largest on record and 89m tonnes more than last year’s harvest, another bumper crop.

All of a sudden it doesn’t sound like a particularly bad year in terms of production, now does it? While there are many factors that cause the rise in grain prices, the main culprit is increased demand, which in turn is caused by people in Asia eating more meat – and people people in Western countries wanting fuel for their cars. Using foodcrops for producing ethanol (and what’s more, the subsidies that go along with this) for fueling cars has by far a bigger impact than the occasional crop failures. Not only is it produced in the wrong countries where production isn’t optimal, it’s also incredibly wasteful: the grain needed to fill up an SUV once would feed a person for a year.

Impact to your grocery prices

Anyhow, now that we’ve established that the true cost of rising crop prices lays elsewhere than what’s often being told to us, it’s time to turn our attention to the everyday groceries. After all, it’s their price that we really care about. The grain prices have gone up as much as 100% over the past year or so, so for the sake of the argument, let’s say that the price of wheat for bread goes up by 100%.

Take this bread as an example here. It costs 2.68eur and weighs 384g – 6.99eur per kilogram. So to start figuring out what a 100% increase in the wheat price does to the bread price, we have to figure out how much the flour-portion of the bread costs to the store / bakery (many stores actually do some of their own baking which is nice).

By being extra-conservative, let’s say the price of the flour was half of what they sell it to consumers for at the same store, though in reality it’s likely to be a lot less. By using this measure, we come at 23 cents per kilogram for the price of the flour. Of a 2.68eur bread which contains 70% wheat flour, the price of the flour is roughly 6 cents – less than 3% of the total price.

Even this very rough analysis therefore produces results that are in line with the 3-5% that is generally accepted as the portion of wheat of the consumer price of bread. Now, if you double the price of wheat, you end up with an increase of 2.7% to the price of the bread – far less than the 20% that has been presented in the media as a certainty for next years’ bread price increase.

And this is bread – the one product where price of grain is likely to be most visible. For most other products, grain makes up an even smaller proportion of the total price, so we should expect even lower price hikes for them. Remember this when you find food prices rising by 10% or even more next year. Of course, other reasons for hiking the prices are also stated like increasing labor costs. However, in other fields the increasing labor costs are offset or more than offset by increasing productivity and it’s difficult to believe the food industry wouldn’t be enjoying from any of that.

And even if they wouldn’t, that’s not really the point – the point is that one cannot pin the blame of 10% or 20% more expensive bread on rising crop prices. Well okay, you can – but you’d be lying.

So do we just let them do that?

Emphasizing the wrong reasons for rising costs, de-emphasizing or completely forgetting to mention that raw material costs are only a tiny fraction of the price of the end product and publishing stories where consumers signal their willingness to submit to higher food prices is a strong and straightforward invitation for stores to raise prices more than what’d be warranted by the real price increases of ingredients. Of course the “analysis” above is very simplistic and carried out with imperfect information and the smallest possible sample, but it’s also a conservative calculation – and even at this level it’s still taking the thinking further than most people – and, indeed, newspapers – seem to be willing to do.

The question is, as with electricity price hikes, do we again just quietly let them raise the prices by much more than the costs have risen?

This is not that much of a review actually, but more of a list of personal experiences. Thorough, more professional, reviews have already been published so go elsewhere for those. Here, however, I will cover some good points and some bad points purely from personal point of view from using the Nokia N81 8GB for a few weeks – a lot of these are also subjective comparisons to my old main phone, the N80.

The good

• The added RAM is one of the best improvements; it’s now actually possible to do multitasking – the browser can be left on the background, lots of other things done, and then one can return to browsing without having the application shut down due to memory management. There’s now ~42MB of free RAM compared with the N80’s 19MB and it makes a world of difference.
• The display (aside from the resolution issues; see below) is nice to look at, bright and big.
• The integrated 8GB memory comes in handy when storing music. I say music, not photos or video, because the camera is not a strong point of this device..
• The slider mechanism works and feels very solid, again a big improvement from the flimsy N80 slider.
• The keypad lock switch; there’s a small slider switch at the top of the phone that locks or unlocks the keypad. Though it feels strange at first, it works nicely enough.
• It’s much more responsive than the N80.
• It certainly looks quite nice; the shiny black finish is beautiful, even if it’s prone to fingerprinting.
• The battery life is significantly improved over the N80.

The bad

• The screen, though big and bright, has poor resolution. I wrote more about this earlier.
• The keypad build quality is not satisfactory; the keys are creaky and flimsy, especially the keys on “top”..
• The memory is not expandable; this “8GB ought to be enough for anybody“-attitude sort of reminds me of something.. However, considering the phone probably won’t last more than 2-3 years at best, this limitation may be something we can live with.
• The 2-megapixel camera takes poor-quality photos and records equally poor, choppy video.
• The navi-wheel functionality is supposed to be nice, but unfortunately the functionality is mediocre at best and only available in the music player. For one, why isn’t scrolling when browsing possible, huh?
• The screen rotation is not automatic and not universally available in the applications.
• The earphones that the phone comes with are uncomfortable as heck; they’re way too small and don’t stay put. The standard audio jack helps in getting a better replacement.
• The battery life, though improved as I mentioned, is still not really good enough for even two full days of active use.
• There’s no GPS. What the heck, as a relatively high-end N-series device, I thought it was a given to have integrated GPS, but apparently not..

Overall, the N81 is clearly targeted to people who mainly want to listen to music or play the upcoming N-Gage games – which means I’m not in the target audience as such. It’s a nice phone overall, but the improvements over the N80 are far less remarkable than what I would’ve expected from two years of development.

How about the iPhone, then?

Incidentally, I also had an iPhone for testing for a few days. Even more so than with the N81, there have been many reviews on the iPhone so I’ll skip the basics and, again, list some main points about iPhone from a purely personal perspective:

• The display is gorgeous. At 480×320 the resolution is not too bad either, though considering the pixel count is about the same as with the N80 that has a physically much smaller screen, a higher-DPI display would’ve been welcomed.
• EDGE is too slow. The iPhone really needs 3G or HSDPA. Surfing the web over WLAN is a joy, but over EDGE it’s quite painful.
• The device itself is really beautiful and feels solid. And requires frequent wiping off due to fingerprints.
• The camera is of terrible quality.
• The UI is, of course, revolutionary. Or is it? It’s certainly a joy to use and offers plenty of smooth eye candy. Even text input works better than I expected, though it’s still not great for longer texts. However, the charm of novelty quickly wears off and though revolutionary, I don’t think the touch UI is that revolutionary. What I mean by this is that though there will certainly be many imitators and other touch-devices coming out next year, all phones will not be equipped with a touch-display anytime soon. Not until haptic touchscreens go mainstream anyway.

As a whole, the iPhone’s a wonderful device. It does few things really well and especially as a first attempt at a phone by Apple it really is remarkably good. However, it does sorely need faster data connectivity and a better camera.

Which would I buy?

Well, as nice as the iPhone is, I would not pay a thousand euros – or even five hundred – for an unlocked iPhone. At least not until it gets a better camera, 3G/HSDPA connectivity and the platform is opened up and even then it’d be a stretch.

Having said that, I wouldn’t pay the current street price of almost 600eur for the N81 8GB version either. So the answer turns out to be that I wouldn’t buy either if it was my own money that did the talking. This doesn’t mean either of them is a bad phone, it just means I don’t consider them worth the money – YMMV.

Oil heating is the future…

.. and other funny propaganda from the oil industry. I got a magazine called “Lämmöllä” in the mail which turned out to be a publication of “Öljyalan Palvelukeskus” (Finnish Oil and Gas Federation). When you know where it’s coming from, the contents is easy to guess and an article on how oil heating is a modern, environmentally friendly, cheap and safe method of heating your house shouldn’t come as a surprise. On a semi-positive note, biofuels are promoted and even solar panels mentioned as augmenting oil heating but still – I mean come on, who in their right mind would install oil heating at just about Peak Oil?

All-natural waterfall, now with LEDs!

The above-mentioned magazine was a good source of other strange stuff also. Like metallic faucets and showerheads equipped with LED-lighting. The lighting apparently “enhances the soothing effect of running water”. That’s right, lighting for the stream of water coming out of the faucet or your shower. How very natural, just like the waterfall in … umm, nowhere! And the price for these undoubtedly very therapeutic things? Starting from just shy of 4,000 euros. 4,000 euros for a shower head! Are you kidding me?!

Who pays 4,000 euros for a shower head? Are these the same people who install oil heating in a new house?

First came the “paperless” office, now it’s the “wireless” office

Remember the fuss about the paperless office years ago? And how it was followed by an onslaught of printers on every corner and the subsequent masses of paper? Well, now we’re increasingly living in a wireless world, with laptops, mobile phones, WLAN and whatnot.

So with all that wireless stuff, how come I’m always needing more extension cords and why does my office desk looks like this? The fixed connection is and will always be faster and better than the wireless. Laptops can’t even run a day without being plugged in – and mobile phones are almost as bad. Add to that the headsets for listening to music, the USB and Firewire cables for connecting stuff together and what you have is a mockery of a wireless world.

Wow, it’s been a while since my previous restaurant review. Though not much has happened on that front especially in the last few months, that’s not to say nothing has; for example, I’ve deemed restaurant Juuri as a good place that servers some excellent “sapas” (Finnish Tapas). Another discovery was restaurant Knossos which serves nice enough Greek food. In other developments, Colorado Bar & Grill unfortunately moved already quite some time ago and lost most of its nice decor in the process. Also, at four locations now, it has a feeling of a chain but still continues to serve decent basic food. Another traditionally reliable place, Santa Fe, continues on their slightly downward slope, still maintaining an “okay” rating but having failed to really do anything new and exciting for a long time.

Anyway, to the topic at hand: last Thursday my sister & her husband generously took us to lunch to Grill It!, located at the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Helsinki. And what a lunch it was; at five courses and three hours, it was one of the best as well as longest lunches I’ve ever had. The Grill It! restaurant is currently running a menu that includes the exquisite kobe beef that we all took. I’d never tasted Kobe beef before so it was bound to be an interesting experience. The occasion was also the first “real” restaurant visit with Amanda, who behaved beautifully throughout the meal to the great relief of her parents and, I’m sure, all the other customers.

For starters, the menu called for Arctic prawns and prawn mousse with herb salad and grilled tiger prawn. As you can see on the left (click on all the images to see the bigger version), the presentation looked a little messy to my taste and thrown together, but the taste more than made up for that. The prawns were cooked well and the lemony sauce was excellent with the near-perfect herb salad. Moving on from the starters, the following statement will likely shock everyone who knows I don’t drink beer:

Beer is good..

.. when used properly, that is. And the proper usage, it turns out, is to have the cattle drink it and then eat the beef.

So what followed after the starter was the tasting of grilled Wagyu beef. Elsewhere on the menu advertised as Kobe beef, strictly speaking it should’ve been called “Kobe-style” beef as it came from wagyu-cattle in New Zealand, not Japan. It’s needless to say the 50g portion was small, but it sure was delicious. I can’t really say whether it was the best beef I’ve ever had but it certainly was right up there with the other candidates. Along with the beef, various salts were offered which also turned out to be an interesting and tasty experience. I especially liked the Hawaii red alaea salt.

After one had tasted the Kobe beef, there was a distinct desire to eat some more. In the menu, the Kobe beef was matched with a “regular” beef tenderloin steak; Grill master’s famous pepper steak with pepper sauce and country potatoes. Unsurprisingly, the country potatoes turned out to be fries and the dish also came with some vegetables. All of the “extras” were in their own dishes so one self-arrange the ingredients and could pour whatever amount of the sauce was desired on the steak – a nice touch.

The steak was cooked near-perfectly as per my medium-request; in most places in Finland it seems that to get a medium one needs to order a “medium minus”. In any case, the steak was quite mouthwatering and the delicious pepper sauce went along with it very well. The fries were also very good, but the grilled vegetables (zucchini and bell pepper) were a little ho-hum, quite boring standard fare. But as a whole, this “second” main course perfectly filled the spot left by the Kobe beef.

So it can be safely said that there was nothing wrong with the food – quite the contrary, it was delicious. But what about the other things? The basics were in a good shape; cloth napkins, clean tables, comfortable seats and a nice and warm but simple indoor decor made Grill It! an all around comfortable if somewhat unimaginative place to eat. It has clearly been designed as quite neutral to appeal to an international hotel audience. The waitress trainee that occasionally served us was nearly completely lost with our basic questions and requests, but didn’t really screw up as such at any point which was good. The other waitresses (note: in many places in Finland it’s common and normal that one table is served by more than one waitress, which can sometimes be confusing but is sometimes – like in this case – also a good thing) were better. All, however, were friendly and generally attentive, even though they failed at one very basic thing – making sure we have enough water without having to ask for it.

If the service gets a small minus mark, so does the staffing organization in the kitchen. This is not something one would normally notice, but we sat right next to the open kitchen so I did; there was clear discontent of the fact that there wasn’t a third chef at work to replace someone who had been sick for a few days already. Even the waitresses asked the head chef in disbelief “So it’s just the two of you here?!”. At some later point in time, a third chef appeared whom everyone including the waiting staff warmly welcomed to work – clearly called in for additional help ruining his day off. Despite these wrinkles in the staffing, the kitchen managed to churn out good-quality food at a very good pace, so kudos to them for that.

What about the finale then, the dessert? As did the mains, the dessert also came in twos. The first one, blood orange sherbet, below left, had a very fluffy composition (which is good) and a distinct blood orange taste, yet being sweet at the same time. The second dessert, Sea buckthornberry Brûlée, below right, was a clever concoction; the sea buckthornberry jam was deposited at the bottom of the brûlée and made for an interestingly tangy contrast with the brûlée.

All in all, the set menu was in every way a very good experience. It would’ve been great even without the Kobe tasting, but that topped it off perfectly. So, onless it already came through in the review, I can highly recommend Grill It!

Even though I’ve never read any of his former works, I semi-actively follow what Tomi T Ahonen is up to in his blog and at Forum Oxford. For one, he’s got some interesting opinions that are diametrically opposed to those of Ville Saarikoski on the power of SMS vs e-mail. Anyway, that is a debate for another time. The situation at hand now is that some time ago, Tomi and Jim O’Reilly came out with a new book which I just finished reading: “Digital Korea: Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home”.

That is, without a doubt, the longest title of any book I’ve ever seen

Anyway, as the name would imply, Digital Korea basically showcases the Korean status of digital everything. Though covering a remarkably wide range of topics ranging from robots to e-government, most focus revolves around the various incarnations of mobile and Internet. It soon becomes clear – painfully clear – that on most fronts, the term “information society” is nothing but a word for example in Finland. In Korea it’s a reality today; or, well, yesterday since books on such quickly developing topics tend to be old information by the time they’re out of the press.

The book is bubbling with various statistics, both generally about the digital state of the world and specifically about Korea. Some are very interesting in the way they highlight the vast difference between the developmental stages of Korea versus other countries – like the fact that 98.5% of the handsets in Korea were mobile Internet-enabled already in 2005. Some other statistics are borderline obscure but insightful in other ways; for example the fact that according to BDDO, 60% of cellphone users globally take their phone to bed with them – physically to bed, not just on the nightstand!

In addition to the statistics bits, there are lots of other gems in terms of services covered, use cases and anecdotes of life in Korea. The most dominant online services like Cyworld are given quite a bit of coverage and each chapter winds up with a case study. Some of the gems of information to take home are not technological either; for example, the following mobile “code of conduct” from KTF (locally the second largest wireless carrier) is something I would love to see promoted – and adhered to – over here, too:

Cellphone code of conduct: 8 simple rules from KTF in South Korea

1. Switch to silent mode in public places.
2. Make your conversation quiet and simple.
3. Switch to silent mode in a class or meeting room.
4. Ask the person you call if he or she can answer the phone at the moment before you start conversation.
5. Don’t start conversation with someone who is driving. Call back later.
6. Refrain from using mobile devices around medical equipment or during flight.
7. Identify yourself when you send a text message.
8. Care about others’ rights and privacy before you use camera phone. Never take pictures of others without their consent.

As insightful, fascinating and good reading as Digital Korea is – and it is all that – there are some problems with the book ranging from minor to major. As a minor annoyance I would count the very poor-print-quality, mixed-style graphs and charts as well as the statistics that are interspersed all over the book (though to be honest, spreading them out is a good thing also). To the medium range go things like too much repetition; same services and comments can be (re-)mentioned in half a dozen places.

To the more severe side, I would personally include one blemish in particular; the fact that the authors take what I think can be a fatal assumption: that the present state and the future of Korea is our future as well. They state:

“We are convinced that these changes will happen in all industrialized countries [...] To understand our digital future, understand Digital Korea.”

I find this assumption quite simplistic. Despite the numerous advanced technological developments and their consequences (which, it should be pointed out, are not all uniformly good), it’s almost crazy to think that the world of Digital Korea will be copied as such to other nations. One only needs to look at a number of past or current technologies and services to understand that they are being utilized very differently in different countries.

While we may all have 100Mbps ubiquitous Internet connectivity at some point in the future, what we use it for will still retain a lot of variety – and as soon as there are deviations in the technologies and, more importantly, the way we use them, understanding one environment does not ensure understanding another. Does it help to see what is done elsewhere? Certainly, no doubt about it. But are all industrialized countries hardwired to repeat the process as it has unfolded in Korea? I think not.

Having said all this, I did find Digital Korea highly interesting and insightful reading. It certainly brings up a number of issues that need to be thought of over here, too. It also brings in some fresh ideas; what’s more, many solutions can – and should be – copied or adapted from Korea ASAP. By setting aside the not-invented-here-syndromes and using some technology and services from a place where they’re already mainstream, mature and widely used, we could easily get closer to the Korean level of digitalization on a number of fronts. All in all, Digital Korea is certainly worth your while if you want to understand some of the possibilities of the digital world.

Again I’m reminded of the slogan “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”.