| 16.10.2005 The weekend's almost over... Meh. All gone by in a flash. In a blurry, drunk flash. So here I now sit, listening to some stand-up comedy channel on SHOUTcast. They've got Jerry Seinfeld on now, doing his Air Travel routine that I've heard a million times, fairly distracting... I had a lot to say, when I sat down in front of the computer. Now I... Well, now I don't. Everything fled, and hid. So I'll just recap the events of the past few days, and then we'll see, maybe something will jog my memory. But first I'll consume that pot of pasta bolognese I just cooked. So... The crappy pasta consumed, where did we stop last time? Ah yes, the grand Wednesday looting spree. Afterwards it was all school and home. Nothing special what so ever, I think. Except that I suddenly felt like having a few stiff drinks on Friday. Well, felt like having a few for the whole week, really. Quite a few, preferably. And that Friday, I did. Went over to a friend's place, had some vodka... Then off to Komeetta, our humble local disco. A hole, a ghastly hole. But we later met some friends, so fun was had by all. Eventually. Except that I lost my phone, again. Must have forgotten it at the counter when I was buying drinks, cos once I called it, as soon as I got home, the bartender answered and told me to pick it up in the morning. Phew. Anyway, the evening was well worth it alcohol-wise. That was very much obvious when I woke up next "morning", around noon, still smashed. I barely remember ambling over to the club, retrieving my phone and ordering a pint. A pint to stave off the inevitable hangover, or to at least smooth the transition somewhat. Having forced down that beer, I went food shopping. Also a bit of a memory lapse there, but I did get some food. Exhausted by all the movement, I went home and slept, I think. Then I ate. Oh lord. Felt so sick, so very sick... Crawled into the shower, and sat under the healing streams of water, alternating between hot & cold, which sort of helped. For a while... In the end I found myself hugging the toilet, projectile vomiting like there was no tomorrow. Now that helped a lot. Few things can beat the relief of a proper puke in the morning after! Oh, and guess what? That same day I was supposed to be hauling my boat out of the water... Well, it's still floating in the frigid waters of the Gulf of Finland. I'll get her out next weekend, plus it'll give me more time to get the excess stuff out of her, like that damn battery and the rubber dinghy... Oh, and let us not forget the emptying of the "Honey Pot", aka the dreaded Chemical Toilet. Now, I think I will depart. Will have a shower and play something, or go meet a friend. But I will leave linky goodies behind, so click away. I'll make this one dirty, I think. First, I know many of you are going all boinky over this Vida Guerra chick. I dunno, not my type, but here are the pics stolen from her phone... And then just some plain old lesbian loving. Lickety lick, girls. And why not take a nice close view at the wonders of the female body? Nothing like a sweaty nipple or a slimy cunt to brighten up a dreary day! Oh, and this one's fun: control Jessica Simpson. Ok, it's off to the shower for me... |
 Autumny  An obligatory misty morning picture. |
12.10.2005 What a grand day this has been. Oh, what a grand day indeed! See, this is the up after the down. But no, I have all the valid, in my opinion, reasons for this enthusiasm. Let me explain. This is once again one of those "I bought/stole something and now I feel sorta better" things. But just listen to this... Since I bought my GeForce 6600GT GFX card, I've been thinking about overclocking it, giving it that extra bit of oomph that is perhaps only noticeable to a real gamer, but that is there none the less, strangely warming the gamers heart... So yeah, in order to effectively do that I had to buy a proper cooler. Like this one, a Zalman VF 700-CU. That set me back 28,90. I also got that pretty & slim black Labtec keyboard that I ordered from another company. They still haven't called me, so fuck them. Got it one euro cheaper, too, at 15,90... Setting up the new cooler was a major bitch, an operation fraught with peril as the warranty was rendered null and void the moment I took the original cooler off. It is also relatively easy to crack the GPU of the card if you apply a bit too much pressure or if your hand slips. Then it's goodbye 157 Eur... Needless to say, it all went off without a hitch, although with a lot of sweating & swearing. Today, after another mind-numbingly easy and short day at my school for the gifted, I decided to pay my annual visit to Stockmann's, for a big discount sale held there annually, Crazy Days. You might recall the visit I paid them last year... This year was productive as well. Bought a couple of DVD's, Pirates of the Caribbean & Hamburger Hill, a new mouse mat, some AAA batteries for my new MP3 Player, Creative Zen Nano Plus 1Gb (Uh, forgot to mention it, nicked this one a few days ago), and a 512 meg SD card. But that's not all, kittlings, oh no, not at all... For the shining crown jewel of this shopping/looting spree can be seen to your right, a brand spanking new Canon Digital IXUS 50. That baby would have set me back 300 Eur, but guess what? Mrs. Palm and her five lovely daughters are good for plenty more than just beating the ol' bald monkey. So, at the end of the day I got my rush and some wonderful new toys to play with. The monster is fed! Oh, and the pic on the right is very probably the last one you'll see taken with my trusty old Minolta Dimage Xg. Right, it's pretty late so I think I'll just dump the links and head off to bed. So check out the Next Big Thing, namely Finger Breakdancing! I'll definitely practice those moves... And then some interesting science, an article concerning the development of exoskeletons. I hope I'll have one by the time I'm 109 and not as spry as I used to be. More science? Well, not quite. Some awesome photoshoping, though. Check out The Plantimals! |
 My new toy, my pride and joy. |
10.10.2005 Weird, how I seem to have emptied over the past few... Months? Weeks? Hard to pinpoint, really. I first noticed the affliction in school, where I first thought it would be confined. What affliction? Why, the creeping emptiness of course! Let me describe the symptoms. First, as the name indicates, there is a vague, but all encircling, feeling of emptiness. Can't describe it any better than that, really. Physically it feels pretty much like exhaling all the air in you and emptying your mind of thoughts. Like suffering a complete physical & mental deflation. Then an example: somebody approaches you at school. Say, a classmate. Hell, let's add some incentive for conversation here, so, say, a pretty classmate. Asking you an unimportant something or other that you should answer with an equally unimportant something or other, but... A vacant look steals into your eyes, and, as you open your mouth to utter your witty and/or informative reply, you say nothing. Oh, not because you can't think up an answer. No, there are, but as the mouth opens nothing comes out, because you feel suddenly deflated, and whatever you were going to say is rendered meaningless. A feeling best summed up with the following phrase: "Why bother?". Quite a peculiar feeling. After that, you resort to communication with monosyllables. And even then only when practically forced to. So yeah, the affliction then spills over to infect the rest of your life. And soon you find yourself barely communicating with even the bestest of your mates... I am not sure as to what causes it. It might be the disappointments and turmoils in my relationship, but the magnitude of the problem, and the place where it first cropped up (i.e. school), seems to indicate that it can't be all that. So what the hell? Wherein lies the casua mortis of my emotions and eloquence? Ack, who knows. And as time goes by I seem to care ever less... Perhaps a yet another symptom? So, let's have a cheerful gallery to go along with the cheerful subject. A Staten Island ship graveyard. Continuing with the graveyard theme, here's a similar gallery of a myriad of airplane corpses quietly rotting away in the Arizona desert. And a similar airplane burial ground in Texas. |
 A Wreck. Fatal..? |
09.10.2005 Man, I'm tired and downcast. For a change. I just came home, after a long day out, did dishes, had a shower, put the pics I took today on to the computer... And I feel like my arms are filled with lead. And my head with... Oh man, I don't know, just make up your own simile, if it even is one. Anyhow, I got a major surprise two days ago, when my old childhood friend, Mr. Gronsky the photographer, sent me an SMS saying that he'd be in Helsinki the following day, with his girlfriend. So yeah, they showed up the next day, and I met them later on, listening to the tales of Sasha's travels in the far east, places like Fuyuan (in the Heilongjiang province), Khabarovsk (including the Jewish Autonomous Region, Russia's alternative to Israel!)... Pretty cool. After that, as I recall, we just ambled around a lot, they took tons of pictures of everything. Oh, and had a massive lunch at a Chinese restaurant, and then I showed them the way to my mum's empty place, and gave them the keys... No need to blow a fortune on hotels if you know somebody in town! So we then went back to town, and I left them there, snapping happily away. I paid a visit to my friend, and once again enjoyed the benefits of my 20Gb micro drive, leeching games and stuff, while drinking beer and amiably chatting away about nothing in particular. All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening... Today was the day when large sailing ships congregated in the Helsinki harbor. Pretty cool, lots (about 15 of them) of old wooden schooners, luggers, cutters, you name it. Predominantly Finnish, although there was one British cutter. And you got to climb all over them, many had catering aboard... Mainly selling fishy dishes and pea soup. And beer, naturally. Some also exhibited old men with accordions and reedy voices, singing nautical songs. Brr. A lot of picture-taking ensued here, too. I've been on my feet since maybe 11am, and was already tired, and had sore feet. Sasha and his girlfriend's been up and on their feet since 9am, and walked all the way to town from my mum's place in Oulunkylä, over an hours walk! Freaks. They babbled enthusiastically about the power plants they saw along the way. Yes. After climbing all over the ships in the harbor we took a ferry to Suomenlinna, or Sveaborg, because that's what everybody does and they haven't been there before. We walked all over the decidedly non-touristy bits of the islands, taking pictures of buildings and stuff. And little girls in cute dresses. And little girls on swings. Yes, see, they have this thing about people. They take pictures of them! I hate people, so I don't really understand that fascination. But what do I know..! So yeah, having spent a few hours there we went back to town, where I dropped them off in a tex-mex restaurant and crawled home, weary and broken, feeling that I have perhaps done them wrong by leaving so early... That was that. Now it's time for my meatball potato hash! And since we were speaking of photography today, check this baby out: Pitbulls vs. Bull! The bull got lost after hurricane Katrina, and was attacked by a couple of homeless, hungry pitbulls. In the end, the pittbulls had to be put down by a police officer... And then watch some... Infrared... Images? I dunno. Just... Whatever. |
 A lightship's anchor blob.  The ships! |
06.10.2005 Ah! bliss! I just parked my dokus on a pillow that rests on my lovely leather arm-chair, that is in turn covered by a garish fleece blanket. I don't like leather. I only bought the chair cos it was soft, big, and cheap. But enough about the chair. School was a piece of cake today, spent 4 hours learning the intricacies of MS PowerPoint and Word... Rather boring. But I browse all sorts of sites while occasionally paying attention, plus most of the class can't tell a mouse from their own arse, so the going was painfully slow. In order to utilize the time in a more productive fashion I decided to download MS Office 2003 Enterprise Edition (I think that's the most advanced version there is). Now there are rules preventing us, students, from installing or deleting anything from our accounts. But they do allow us to have USB memory sticks and suchlike. I had my 20Gb Transcend StoreJet 1.8 (nicked it a few days ago) with me, on which I installed BitComet, and voila! In 2 hours I was a proud owner of Microsoft Office 2003. Lesson well spent! After that it was time to go home... But before that I stopped by the Itäkeskus mall, they had some sort of a sale thing going on, loosely transladed it'd mean something like "Lunacy days". Crap, I tell you, crap. No decent discounts, none. All you get are inflatable yellow moons hanging from the ceilings, looking more like bananas, and a couple of crappy old-folk bands, with names like "Evergreen"... It's like they were having a sale for geriatrics. I was looking for a cheap keyboard, but didn't get anything in the end. Ordered one, a Labtec, from the net instead. So that was that. I think I'll go play some HL2 now, and a bit of CS:Source after that. But you... You can read the Gay Slang Dictionary! Weird buggers. Then check out the result of a Python vs. Crocodile fight! With a surreal pic... |
 A "groovy" band. The shoppers rejoice. |
05.10.2005 Madre con Dios..! How time flies, powered by laziness... But whatever. I've an announcement! You won't believe this shit! I've won 213 Eur this morning! Yes! In Keno! That's the first time I win anything this significant. I was rather glad, I must say. The girl behind the counter said that there was no way she could give the prize to me in cash, so I had it wired directly to my bank account. It should appear either tomorrow or the day after... And in case the money happens to have a mishap along the way, I kept the winning ticket. So yeah, I am one lucky sonnabiach. I'll put 100 in my empty savings account and the rest... Well, I'll have enough money for food, at least. As for the rest of my long absence, well, tons of things happened. I am still studying diligently (as diligently as can be realistically expected of me), doing projects, group work (hating pretty much every minute of it) and other schoolsy stuff. Let's see... Had my fresher's party on the 14.09, pretty cool, nothing spectacularly wild, just some "funny" games and a lot of beers in Fever afterwards. Didn't get as drunk as I did a couple of years back, praised be lord. But still managed to loose my cellphone. With all the numbers on it, naturally. Calling after it to the the official lost and found bureau didn't yield any results, not surprisingly. However, a couple of days later I received an unusual delivery via the mail. A brand new phone! My dad, having heard of my predicament from his wife, apparently decided to drop by with a new phone and, since I wasn't at home, dropped it through the mail slot! It's a very cheap Nokia 1101, but the battery life is incredible, probably due to the monochrome screen, and the phone just screams no-nonsense practicality. So I'm happy enough. One other reason to be happy has been added to the list yesterday: I bought myself a spankin' new GeForce 6600GT! Oh, cheap it wasn't (for my budget) but hell, it's a beast! I'm now running Half-Life 2 with all the bells and whistles on, plus anti-aliasing x2! I've been upgrading the old square-headed spouse lately anyway, and it now sports an AMD Sempron 3000+ processor and a gig of ram... Plus a new 420W silent power and a new quiet processor fan. You could say that I am a well-endowed man in the hardware department now, no real reason to complain... I know it's not top-notch, but neither did it cost an arm and a leg, plus you get more bang for the buck when buying value stuff anyway. So ahem, where was I? Getting carried away with my little hardware-fest, I see. Well, now that's out of the way, I can also tell you that Blowfish is finally at her berth in Helsinki. Yes, it's been a while, I know. In the end I did it in two segments, Nauvo to Inkoo with Z on 23 to 24.09 , and Inkoo to Helsinki with Bonus a week later. Lovely sails both of them, despite it being September during the first and October during the second one. The winds were mighty mild, though. Even a bit too mild. So we ended up burning gasoline for half the trip, both times... The second trip was weird. It was about +15 during the day time, and about +5 during the night, so my heater was very much appreciated. Plus it got dark at around 7pm, which cut down the sailing-day rather drastically. We managed to night-sail with Z, no problem, but then he did have his chart plotter with him. I didn't have it the second time around, plus we wasted a lot of time waiting for the morning fog to clear. But I must say, it is an awesome way to spend a cold autumn night, sitting in the friendly glow of the cabin light, listening to the radio and the hummm*click*hummm of the heater and smelling the roasting spam and boiling macaronis lovingly prepared by Bonus... Awesome, simply awesome. Add some beer and good company to that, and you're close to imagining the atmosphere aboard blowfish that cold, dreary Friday night moored in the estuary of whatever-the-fuck dinky river that leaks out of Inkoo. So the end of day one of the second trip saw us in Helsinki waters, where we had to moor at Pihlajasaari due to the sunset... On day two, before heading home, we paid a visit to the central Helsinki south harbor, right opposite the presidential palace and the market square. They were having a huge fish-market thing going on, held annually since 1742. Which, incidentally, brings me to another joyous piece of news: I have now been smoke free for a bit over a year! Yes, yes... Your heartfelt congrads are accepted! But that's it. This update is now at an end, and since there is no God, nobody knows when the next update is going to be... Here, check out the benefits of quitting smoking! And then take a look at 99 weird pics. Um.. What else? Oh, check out what happends when the crew of a fishing boat gets careless while watching a "sexy film"... |
 Sunset near Hanko.  Ze Finnish Navy!  Cozy dinner...  Homecoming. |
