Well, he’s finally here: our baby boy was born on August 9th and (following Finnish tradition) is as yet unnamed!

I used the sports tracker again to record the route I take when I cycle to work. It’s not the shortest, but it’s along the sea and passes some of the nicest spots in Helsinki, most notably the Kaivopuisto park.

View Larger Map

Update: showing the path recorded by Sports Tracker in Google Maps is very simple if you have access to a web file storage. Just upload the .KML file to a public location, and copy the URL in the “search” box in Google Maps. 

Taken with the Nokia Sports Tracker application. More details about the workout can be seen here.

View Larger Map

I’ll break the long silence with the celebration of an anniversary: the ZX Spectrum is 25 today!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/23/spectrum_zx_25/

The Spectrum was the first computer I laid hands on, and I have the fondest memory of it and its awesome 48K of memory…

Christmas is coming! I have been too busy to update the site in a long time, but here are some Xmas greetings. See you next year!

Happy Halloween! Nobody is throwing a party this year, and maybe that’s for the best considering that the weather is truly horrendous. But just to do something Halloween related, I decided to write this post to look back at a bit of history.

The parties were a tradition we had with Sean and Kaidi, my flatmates in Helsinki for more than four years. We shared a big flat in Ilmarinkatu 16 that was just perfect for the purpose (though it had no bottomless pit).

The first party was in 2000 (my first year in Finland), and it was quite basic in retrospect, but loads of fun nevertheless. Unfortunately no pictures remain (but if you are reading this and have some, do send them to me!)

In 2001 we repeated the experiment, and it was as successful. This time there are pictures to prove it.

In 2002 we thought that it was enough with the classic horror stuff, and a different theme was needed. The 70s were all the rage at that time, and so the “Haunted by the 70s” 2002 Halloween Party was born. This was also the first time we had Tiina’s outstanding invitation.

In 2003 we almost had had enough, but in the end the exilharation from the previous party won over the thought of having to clean up after 50plus horrific guests. Another theme was needed, and this time the answer was out there: space! “A Nightmare From Outerspace” was the title of Halloween 2003.

In 2004, having all moved out of Ilmarinkatu, we did take a hiatus after all.

In 2005, Sean and Kaidi announced that they were leaving Finland, and it was agreed at once that they could not go without having one more Halloween. We found a venue and a theme, and the Monsters threw a grand, decadent ball.

And that’s it. This year there is no party, only memories. But they are great memories, and probably enough to get going… until the next Halloween

This is a video I took a few weeks ago while visiting the Great Wall of China near Beijing. There was a sort of cable car/roller coaster ride that took you up and down from the wall, for lazy tourists or those on a tight time budget (I fell in both categories).

It’s also my first experiment with YouTube.

As has been the habit in the last few weeks, I went to see Italy play the football world cup in “Sports Academy”, a sport-themed bar in Helsinki where foreigners usually gather to see their teams play.

Unexpectedly (at least for me), Italy won the match and the whole championship, causing a little celebration to take place in the streets, in almost southern european fashion.

Armed only with my camera phone, I took some pictures to remember the event. A great night!

FIAT just announced a series of phones branded with the carmaker’s name. It beats me why anyone would want to buy a phone with the FIAT name on it, since it is traditionally associated with “cheap” and “unreliable”, but I would be willing to give them a chance if they weren’t plain ugly. Here’s a thought: when your FIAT car will break down in the middle of nowhere, will you trust your FIAT phone to call for help?

Every time I think that “it would be nice to have a website that… (insert nice thing here)” it’s already there. Last time it was the music recommendation system. This time it’s about “collaborative travel guides”.

I’m not very fond of travel sites like Virtual Tourist or Trip Advisor, because the information in there is organized around users rather than topics. However the fact that the content is provided by people based on their travel experiences is a clear value (plus it’s free). So I thought that there should be a community-driven site, but formatted as a travel guide – sort of a “wikipedia for travels”. Sure enough, typing “collaborative travel guide” in Google revealed at least two sites that are exactly what I just described.

World66: The World66 project’s motto is “We believe that travelers are the best source of travel information”. They currently have 77,692 articles on 19,914 destinations all over the world.

WikiTravel: Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. So far they have 8,667 destination guides.

Apart from the numbers, in general I like World66 design better, but WikiTravel tends to have more exhaustive information (although it’s often lacking a map). It’s difficult to make a fair comparison because the quality and amount of information relies on how many writers contributed on a particular entry. For example, I would have liked to compare what they have to say about my hometown, Lucca, but WikiTravel in practice has no information on it yet. The respective entries on Helsinki may be more signifcant. You draw your own conclusions

Helsinki on World66 – Helsinki on WikiTravel