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.

After Garibaldi, Michelangelo and Al Capone, it was only a matter of time before Berlusconi got his own name attached to a pizza. The prime minister of Italy can thank the finnish “Koti Pizza” (“home pizza”) chain for the honor, and let’s hope this will help heal the finnish-italian gastro-diplomatic relationships that went sour a few years ago over some statements from the very same head of state. The ad says – I think -  “elected best pizza in the world” (although it could also say “mundane parhaaksi elect pizza” according to this automatic translator). I have no idea what the ingredients are, but knowing the finnish sense of humour I would bet there is parma ham.

I’ve often thought that Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, got the ideas for some of his comics from a disgruntled Nokia employee, but now I start to worry that the guy is actually sitting very close to me. Last week I had exactly the incident described in today’s strip, although with less dramatic consequences: having just moved to a different floor, I had forgotten to change my printer settings and printed a couple of pages to the wrong place. Mr. Adams, you owe me royalties!

Although this is the high season for the sailors of the Baltic sea, yesterday the number of boats seen floating around the old harbour was unusually high.     The reason was the arrival of the Götheborg, a mid-18th century Swedish ship that had sailed the trade routes to Asia, sunk in front of its home harbour of Göteborg and was very recently rebuilt. I took these two photos from the balcony as the ship was approaching Suomenlinna. 

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…

This is the time of the year I should renew my subscription to the service provider that hosts this site. And every year, I promptly avoid doing it until it’s too late. There seems to be a strange fascination in watching the daily emails reminding me that the domain is about to expire, and ignore them.

So if you have tried to access the site or send me email, and failed, now you know why.

There is a number of italian restaurants in Helsinki, some of them bad, some of them good, many of them quite expensive. However they all have one thing in common: their menus are full of spelling mistakes! The incriminated menu in the picture (if you can’t spot the mistake, “Bianci” should be “Bianchi”) is from Trenta, an upper scale restaurant recently opened in one of the Sokos chain hotels. As a matter of fact I liked the food and the service, and they obviously spent a lot of money to get things done right, so why couldn’t they pay a decent italian translator? I mean, it’s two pages of text, how expensive can it be?

So here is my proposal: if you have an italian restaurant, or a restaurant with items written in italian in the menu, send them to me and I’ll spell check them for free. You can offer me a dinner (in that case for two, please ) if you want, but you don’t have to. I’ll do it just for my own peace of mind, so that I don’t have to take my blue pencil with me every time I go out.

P.S.: of course this apparently crazy proposal is supported by the fact that the number of restaurant owners that read this blog is a big fat 0. As a matter of fact, that’s probably the number of readers in general.

P.P.S.: the “blue pencil” is a reference to a practice in use in italian schools, where the teacher has a double ended pencil, one end being red and the other blue. The red end is used to mark “normal” mistakes, and the blue is for critical ones.

I’m writing this post using MaemoWordPy, a blog client for Maemo/Nokia Internet Tablet that seems to work nicely enough. The photo below is one of the stock images that came with the N810, as I couldn’t find a decent subject to shoot with the built-in camera.