• I saw Erykah Badu singing at Lucca’s Summerfest, in the middle of the old town. I didn’t know who she was before the gig (I went mainly to meet some friends) and I was pleasantly surprised by her show.
• For the first time in my life, I went to the island of Capraia. This adds to the list of places (which includes some heavyweights like Sardinia, Isola d’Elba and Cinqueterre) that I had never visited before I moved to Finland.
• The iPhone 3G was launched in Italy. I didn’t witness any public display of madness, except on the national press (an example: one until now respected journalist claimed that this is the device that will realize the human dream of absolute knowledge…).
• Despite a reasonable amount of exercise and the (false) promise of the “light mediterranean diet”, I gained almost 4 kilos! A self-improvement program is on its way.

Apart from that, I met the usual array of friends and relatives, read a lot of books (though no Chandler, as tradition would have required), played some tennis and ate some great food. And the return home to Helsinki was, and still is, blessed by an absolutely wonderful weather that made it all the easier. 

Now, how many days till Christmas?

The new guestbook is nothing but a specialized Wordpress page, as described in this useful blog post.

Now go ahead and sign! 

For 4 persons:

2 dl cream
1 and 1/2 dl milk
1 vanilla bean
5 egg yolks
3/4 dl sugar
1/2 dl cane (brown) sugar

Cut the vanilla bean in half across its length and remove the seeds. Mix the milk and cream and bring to boil with the vanilla bean, set aside to cool down. Remove the bean, let it dry and store, you can use it several times (thankfully, given how much they cost)

Beat the yolks with the (white) sugar and mix them with the milk and cream. Pour the mixture in 4 small bowls, cover them with aluminum foil and set on a deep baking tray. Fill the tray with water so that the water level is more or less at the level of the cream in the bowls (hopefully you have checked before covering with the foil :P)  Heat the oven to 150 C, put in the tray and leave it there for 45 minutes (this is the time in the original recipe - it usually takes me a bit longer, perhaps it depends on the oven. Just see when the cream has become firm), take it out and leave it to cool down.

Sprinkle the brown sugar on top and caramelize it either by leaving it for a few minutes under the oven grill, or using the appropriate tool (see video below). If you use the grill watch out, it’s easy to burn the sugar.

Enjoy! Oh, and the glasses aren’t really necessary…

Midsummer, or Juhannus as it is called around here, has come and gone and with it the longest day of the year. This is the view on the backyard that the Balecam showed at 1am, as you can see it was still pretty bright.

Although most finns go out of town during this holiday, I stayed in Helsinki to tidy up the house in preparation for my parents’ visit next week.

Following Vesa’s footsteps, I decided to make a first-person video of my bike trip to work, with head-mounted camera(phone) and all. The actual riding time is a bit over twenty minutes, but I shrunk it to two minutes for the attention span challenged. Watch with audio on!

P.S.: I have blogged about the route before.

P.P.S.: After looking at various video sharing services, I decided to go with Vimeo because of those I tried, it seemed to offer the best video quality. It is quite bandwidth hungry though.

I regularly read a web comic called Wondermark, and this episode seemed particularly funny to me. I find the combination of pretend-victorian illustrations and disjoint text absolutely hilarious.

And I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing my own creations here, but there haven’t been enough boring meetings at work yet…

Well, the iPod Touch, that is. I got it as a farewell present from my former colleagues (thanks guys!) and I’m already in love with the damn thing. The interface is so well made that I could spend hours just flipping through album covers and moving icons around for the mere fun of it. And I can record TV shows on the mac with EyeTV, transfer them to the iPod and watch them on the way to work, which is the most sensible implementation of mobile TV I’ve seen so far (of course you can do the same with most phones these days, but it’s the screen size that makes the difference).

Now if only there was something to watch…