Only slightly bent

Jail time for downloading music?

Gene Simmons. I don’t like his music, and apparently I really dislike his view of the business also. On the latest Condé Nast Portfolio, his interview includes some pretty appalling stuff. When talking about downloading music, his comments include:

..my sense is a trillion dollars of lost income.
[..]
What’s missing is repercussions for bad behavior. Jail time, taking peoples’ homes, cars. I mean legitimate hardcore penalties for theft.
[..]
That means that there are possibly trillions of dollars which can be collected.

Trillions of dollars my ass.. news flash, Gene: the entire music industry yearly revenue is about 30 billion euros. For a businessman to talk about trillions in lost revenue is pretty pathetic arithmetic.

The world and its value chains are changing. We have been ironing out and eliminating inefficiencies from many industries for decades now, and it’s about time the music industry got on with that, too. Quit whining and adapt or die. You could start by making better music.

How we love biofuels … somewhere else

At the Helsinki airport, ST1 fuel trucks are decorated with big slogans proclaiming “Bioenergy is our passion”. Curiously enough, these trucks do not carry an ounce of biofuels as such a thing is not in use for jet fuels.

Besides, it’s a very questionable strategy for any company to promote their allegiance to first-generation biofuels these days.

The things you’ll do with your phone 15 years from now..

While at the airport the other day, I was struck by some interesting behavior in phone usage; a 10-year-old was sporting a high-end phone, the Nokia N82. That alone might be strange in some countries, but in Finland it’s nothing unusual.

What he did with it was more interesting; he used the Nokia Barcode Reader and tried to scan the 2D barcode on his printed e-ticket. Of course, nothing happened.

But that made me think – why is it “of course” nothing happened? Why couldn’t something happen? The more I thought about it, the more I became something could’ve and should’ve happened. If only enough of the pieces were in place, he could’ve – and in my opinion, should’ve – been able to:

• See the real-time departures information as to whether his plane is on time
• See the seat map of the plane and the seat assigned to him
• See the weather forecast at the arrival point for when the plane is due to arrive
• Be offered some games for download while he still could, so that the flight wouldn’t be so boring

Of course, passengers with other interests could be offered countless other things like technical details of the aircraft they’re about to board, crew names & profiles and links whatever blogs they maintain, locations of passengers who’ve tagged themselves as willing to socialize during the flight and so on and on.

I would’ve welcomed any or all of these things, but did it occur to me to try to scan the barcode? No, because I knew it wouldn’t do anything. But seeing someone try it made me realize that it should do something.

Every now and then a news item from within my own industry manages to catch me by surprise. Like this thing here today: Nokia to acquire Symbian.

Okay, so fine, paying a quarter billion euros for a platform that has often been called the developers’ nightmare is one thing. But then Nokia is also forming a Symbian Foundation at same time, with some interesting goals:

The foundation is also committed to moving the platform to open source during the next two years and intends to release the platform under the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free.

Qué?

My knee-jerk reaction to this was that who in their right mind would ever want to see the Symbian source code?! I mean if I had to pick one platform or product that I don’t want to know how it’s built, it’d be Symbian. Could be a publicity stunt in an attempt to gain lots of goodwill from a dying platform. It’s not like the platform is exactly salvageable, no matter how many open-source developers you throw at it.

Whatever the reasons and the eventual outcome, this was one interesting piece of news. Of course, it’s something that should’ve happened 10 years ago; the Symbian today might have then been a very different beast.

One annoying and recurring problem in Helsinki is that many of the best restaurants are closed for the summer season. This is pretty incredible as most tourists visit here during the summer, but I guess the cooks need their summer vacation also.. Anyway, during the midsummer party (Juhannus) the situation is the worst as most restaurants, good or bad, are closed for the weekend. So when we were going to eat out (sponsored by the in-laws) on the midsummer eve, options were somewhat limited.

Luckily hotels rarely close and their restaurants thus have to stay open also, so we chose to go to restaurant Macu, located in the Crowne Plaza hotel in Helsinki. Even they were serving a limited 3 x 3 menu, but luckily it contained most of the best bits of their real menu. In addition to the generally nice and wide but also limited enough even when regular menu, the wine selection at Macu was quite extensive with a cool wine “cellar” in the middle of the neatly decorated and elegant dining room. While the decoration didn’t include any dramatic elements and was done in a safe hotel-fashion, it was a pleasant place and had a nice atmosphere anyway – definitely slightly better than your average middle-of-the-road hotel eatery.

For starters, I went with the Shellfish ceviche with lime dressing (€12,30) which was quite close to a perfect starter – fresh prawns and a delicious, light lime dressing to top it off. Even the asparagus, which I generally don’t care that much about, was quite agreeable. The portion also wasn’t too big to spoil the appetite for the mains, but was of a decent size anyway – i.e. it didn’t just leave one angry

The mains on the limited menu included fish, duck and meat, and wanting to take the safe route here, I took the Grilled fillet of beef with sage potatoes, morels and thyme sauce (€27,20). It proved to be a good choice as the fillet was grilled perfectly as requested (medium minus) and was all around delicious. Most others in the party went with the duck (Roasted duck breast, couscous seasoned with apple and dark raspberry sauce at €23,10) and I only heard comments of approval about that, too.

As far as service goes, it was very efficient, friendly and attentive – really the only minor minus came from the baby high chair not being ready waiting for us though I had requested one when making the reservation. But that was peanuts and overall the experience was very enjoyable. Prices, as you can probably tell, were somewhere in the average-upper average scale as far as restaurants in Helsinki go; more importantly, the price-quality ratio was good. Given that, I can easily recommend Macu, once again proving wrong the old adage that hotel restaurants are best avoided. Not so.

I was in Monaco for a couple of days earlier this week on a business trip. As is the tradition, I’ll mainly let some photos do the talking. Before the photos (which you can click to get a bigger one) however, a few notes on flying.

As fuel prices continue their relentless rise, airlines are in a financial nose-dive with many already having crash-landed. Instead of just directly raising ticket prices (which they’ll be forced to do anyway) they are engaging in an annoying practice of adding fees on everything imaginable and sometimes unimaginable. In the words of Michael O’Leary (RyanAir boss) who says BA “is levying surcharges faster than it’s losing bags at Terminal Five“. Touché. Anyway, as a passenger, it’s somehow highly annoying having to pay extortionate prices for basic stuff like water on board, especially when you can’t even bring water along from the outside anymore.

I’m still waiting for an airline that charges more the fair way; from overweight passengers. I think it’s plain and simply unfair that people of healthy size have to pay for a few measly extra baggage kilos while some people who hop onboard with 20, 30 or 40kg extra weight strapped to their waist can get away with it for free. Kind of like the recent success of high cigarette taxation in NYC, taxing the overweight might provide an additional incentive to lose some of that.

Talking about flying, it is an awesome sight to see another airplane heading the opposite way close to your plane. You start to appreciate the speed of these things when the other plane screams by at a relative speed of 1,800km/h.. Still I’d prefer not to see any more of those any closer, thank you very much.

Finally, how come nobody – like the travel agent for example – told me that there is a frequent and relatively inexpensive helicopter shuttle between Nice airport and Monaco? Now I had to find this out from the guy sitting next to me on the way there. Sure the drive there along the coastal road – which I luckily chose over the highway thanks to a hint from that same guy – had one of the nicest sceneries there is, but compared to what a chopper ride along the same coast would’ve had? No contest.

Those helicopters would’ve been the basic transportation choice; the heliport was one busy place:

When one thinks of Monaco, the first thing that comes to mind is boats. Big boats. And there certainly were enough of those to go around. While awesome, it’s somewhat sad that they all seemed to be docked at the harbors. Now come on, the least you can do if you have a boat like that is to use it.

The villages along the way to Monaco from Nice weren’t all too bad either, as is exemplified by this view of the beach and the surrounding village.

• .. infinite growth in physical (hence, by definition, limited) things is seen as possible, let alone a normal and even a desirable thing?

  “..global passenger numbers grew by a seemingly healthy 4% in the first four months of the year..”

• .. when talking about climate change, the emphasis is on what it will cost if we tackle the issue, not on what it will cost if we don’t?

  Ilmastonmuutoksen hidastaminen maksaa kymmeniä biljoonia

• .. people (in Finland, and actually only in Finland) still consider Finland to be somehow a mecca for “information society” when VISA bills are sent to the wrong people, banks – when they work – hand out counterfeit money, bank system upgrades cause national chaos and the supposedly highly reliable mobile networks can be out of commission for hours?

• .. when fuel prices rise, people complain to the government, as if it was the governments’ fault and refuse to change?

• .. people living in the countryside, who are used to traveling long distances to everywhere, are the whiniest bunch when it comes to actually using your own muscles to do the moving like, say, walking 150m to/from the parking spot?

• .. it doesn’t seem to bother anyone that Saudi Arabia alone is getting $1 billion dollars every day from the rest of the world from exporting oil, with much of that going to SWFs that end up coming back to buy out the buying countries?

• .. Finland is always a special case for the worse when it comes to pricing stuff? TeliaSonera will be selling the iPhone 3G in Finland. The price has not been announced yet, but I’m guessing 199eur. Now recall that Steve Jobs promised that iPhone 3G will sell in “in almost every one of these countries” at a maximum of $199. Just a reminder to the pricing guys at TeliaSonera: 199 EUR != 199 USD. 199 EUR is over 300 USD.

Yesterday was the annual Samba Carnival in Helsinki – the carnival itself is a two-day event but it’s the Saturday parade that I’ve been shooting for the past few years.

Photography-wise this year was a lot more difficult than earlier, not least because I had Amanda with me, we were late and it was sunny (which is far from optimal when it comes to photographic purposes). Anyhow, there we were and I did manage to take a shot or two while resorting to the use of only slight force in order to keep people from trampling over Amanda’s prams..

So nothing stellar this time around but a few shots anyway. I like the one on the left best, but somehow I also like the one below, which is an entirely accidental and unintentional shot.