Well, “switched” is a big word, but indeed I have just bought an Apple Mac Mini, to see if the Apple envy I’ve had ever since I’ve owned a PC is justified or not. It’s too early to give a judgement, and certainly too early to put my old trusty P4 up for sale, but as of now, I’m smitten.

What led me to shell out my hard-earned cash for this tiny white box was the fact that my PC, whether running Windows or Linux, fell short of meeting all of my requirements which were:

- quiet operation
- well integrated multimedia
- a remote control that doesn’t look unbearably ugly
- a Unix shell

You will notice that “play games” is not in the list: yes, I am trying to grow up, or at least avoid spending more nights than necessary at the computer

So far I’ve only booted the PC to use Skype with video, but there’s hope that the situation will change. As for the other applications, I’ve been able to do more or less everything I used to, and I’m especially pleased with the nifty webcam application EvoCam, now powering the BaleCam

Finland’s lead newspaper (and the only one by international standards), Helsingin Sanomat, published a not so flattering article stigmatizing Italy for dragging down the EU. I’m not qualified enough to give an informed opinion, but I’m posting it here as food for thought. Let’s see if our new government can dispel this image…

It’s that time of the year again. Wikipedia is listing all the known April’s fool hoaxes as they happen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1%2C_2006

I found this “motivational” card that uses Pisa (home of the faculty of engineering where I studied) as a symbol of.. well, check yourself! Maybe I should remove the “education” section from my CV…

Conan O’Brien, host of the “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” show, is in Finland this week-end. Pictures and videos from yesterday’s press conference are here.

At the origin of this visit is an episode of the show, where Conan humorously pledged support for Tarja Halonen’s (the president of Finland) re-election based on their alleged resemblance.

The joke continued for a while, until Tarja actually was re-elected and Conan is now in town to meet her (!).

I have problems finding new music to listen to these days. So I thought that it would be cool to find a site that reads your taste in music and suggest what you might like. I went for a little search and here is what I found:

Gnoosic: a database of music preferences with a twist of artificial intelligence. State your favorite three bands and get suggestions, or enter the name of an artist and see a map of related ones forming around it (the best feature). The same thing exists for books and movies. Cool.

Last.fm: add streaming and social networks to the picture. Based on your preferences you listen to similar music with the free player, and get in touch with people who share the same taste. Not bad, but I don’t care for the social networking aspect and the player had a few quirks.

Pandora: instead of looking at what other people listen to, Pandora classifies the songs based on their characteristics (or as they say, “genoma”). Enter a song or artist you like, and listen to songs that share similar qualities, no matter what genre, decade or user group they belong to. This is my favorite so far, I found lots of good stuff!

Song Tapper: find a song by tapping its rythm on the space bar. It’s not really a recommendation tool, but a music search system (“what was the name of that song that goes ta-ta-taaa-taaa-ta”). However it didn’t seem to work for me, but I thought it was a fun idea.

I haven’t yet found a music search engine that lets you hum the song in the microphone, but it’s only a matter of time…

The Finnish channel “MTV3″ is broadcasting a silly program where two italians (Fabio and Fabrizio) travel around Finland by car and do nothing interesting while perpetuating common sterotypes: they speak bad English, eat Pizza wherever they go and complain that it’s too hot in the sauna. The program is subtitled, so I don’t know why they have to speak English to each other except that maybe the station couldn’t afford an Italian translator. Which may explain why the only time they do make a comment in italian there is no subtitle. But since the comment was about taking women home and dumping them shortly afterwards, it could also be plain shame…

Once again the holidays are over. I will put some photos up soon, meanwhile here is one picture showing how I spent New Year’s Day: moving tons of snow around Tiina’s family’s house in Alavieska (600 Km north of Helsinki)! It was actually fun, and they let me drive the tractor Now I know that the real Finnish winter is not found in Helsinki!

Yesterday Tiina defended her master’s thesis and finally became a Master of Arts! Her thesis was on “Graphic design as part of a movie” and involved the design of beginning titles, final credits, movie posters and graphics needed in the movie itself. The practical part of the work was the graphic design for the movie “Joki” (The River).

It has taken a while, but it was worth it: I think the thesis looks very good and interesting (yes, it is in Finnish, but I usally only look at the pictures anyway ) and it was a chance to watch a lot of old movie classics I hadn’t seen before.

Well done!

The Christmas holidays kicked off with a sauna followed by a dip in the sea. Only -8 outside…