/var/log/orava

Sigh, yet another reason to not vote for the Finnish “Green” Party… their latest brainchild is an Orwellian control horror designed to curb driving and to force people to use public transport. There are so many things wrong with it that I don’t know where to start… so I’ll just refer you to a blog entry (in Finnish) that outlines some of the problems.

Also have to love the “newspeak” of calling it a “traffic jam charge” and having it be active a) for the full day, 07:00 to 18:00 and b) in the whole Helsinki/Espoo/Vantaa area. Umm, what? That’s a “tax”. At least be honest.

Maybe Green party members just don’t ever leave the center of their city, or maybe it’s just blatant “let’s call it that so we can avoid calling it by its real name of ‘tax’” word manipulation. Whichever, the fact remains that outside the (very small) city core, there are traffic jams only during peak rush hours and only on certain roads. I’m at work right now, watching the Ring I road (one of the heaviest-trafficed roads in the whole area). It’s now 10:41, and the road is practically empty. Also, most parts of the greater Helsinki area are empty of traffic pretty much all around the clock. Collecting a “traffic jam” fee from some grandpa driving on some empty Vantaa country road at 07:15 in the morning is… pure greed. Or a mix or Orwellian desire for control and hatred of people who drive cars. Whatever.

As is, it’s a pure (almost 1,000 euros per year?) extra tax for people who drive cars in the greater Helsinki area. I thought we already had a kilometer-based heavy tax on that? It’s called “gas”. Driving over here is already ridiculously expensive, few people do it “just for fun”.

I’d support something that limits people from driving directly in (or to) the center of Helsinki during the peak rush hours — because that is a problem. Set up toll booths. Switch more streets over to “pedestrians only”. That sort of thing. There’s pretty good public transport to and from the center from most places, at the worst you’d need to drive to a “connection parking area” and switch from car to bus/train. But “cross traffic” in Espoo and Vantaa in a quite different matter. I’d like to see the idiots behind this proposal do some cross-Espoo travelling, preferrably with some baggage and in a sleet storm.

Stuff like this has always been the problem with the Green Party, and the reason why voting for them is hazardous. For every good idea they have, they have 3-4 really obnoxious ones. The same seems to apply to their candidates, for every smart one you get a bunch of morons I really don’t want to see in office. All parties have this problem, of course, but for some reason the Greens have it the worst. Maybe it’s the fact that the general party line attracts the worst sorts of “ekohörhö” wandwavers, or maybe it’s something in the (organicly grown) orange juice they drink.

You know, I’m basically a fairly green-minded person; not to the extreme extent that some people I know are, but generally… yeah. I love the outdoors and part of the reason we moved to the backwoods of Espoo was the need to have living green things around us instead of asphalt and concrete. However, stuff like this really makes me want to buy a Hummer that runs on baby seal oil and drive up and down Helsinki streets, as a way of saying “well fuck you too” to stuff like this. Well, not really. But the line between “eco-friendly” and “eco-fascist” seems to be quite thin, nowadays.

We have regular VTES (Vampire: the Eternal Struggle) games every week, alternating between Wednesday and Thursday. The schedule is here and the site is the pub “Kaisla” near the Helsinki railway station – they have lots of room and a good selection of beer.

From now on I’ll be bringing along a bunch of basic “demo” decks to the games, and if some newbies show up I’ll be teaching people the game; if we get enough new people we can run a separate newbie game table. We usually start playing at about 5pm, but play typically continues until 10pm or so – people are welcome to show up whenever.

So… if you want to learn the game, show up tomorrow (or some other game night) and join up. You don’t need to bring anything or know anything, an interest in learning the game (which is quite complex) is enough. The learning curve is well worth it. And hey, there’s beer available from the bar, always a good thing.

Nice weekend. Leonard Cohen was fantastic, managing to be even better than expected. Somehow he made the huge Hartwall Arena seem intimate, which is quite a feat. The backing band was also superb. Janka writes some more on the subject.

Sunday was mostly spent at the salle, we did six hours of Bolognese sidesword. Fun, and a weird mix of easy and quite difficult; some moves felt quite natural, while some were a total bitch to get even remotely right. Normal thing when learning a new weapon, or course. The seminar was also Ilkka’s Assistant Instructor exam, so we did some things (as told to by Guy) to make his life more difficult. He did splendidly and gave us an excellent day of learning the fundamentals of a new(ish) weapon… and easily passed the exam too. Over the years Ilkka has become a good martial arts teacher, it’s been interesting watching him develop both as a swordsman and as a teacher. I do like the sidesword, it’s a fun weapon which combines techniques from various other sword styles I’m familiar with; I’d like to learn more.

Only negative for the day was the fact that my back was killing me, I had picked up a nasty pain in my lower back from somewhere and had to eat some tabs to keep it in check. Those mostly helped, though some parts of the day were painful, literally. Good thing is that the pain is a lot less now, on Monday. Exercise helps (except when it doesn’t, of course).

On Wednesday we went to see Tuulta Päin, a play by Gérald Sibleyras (originally titled “Le Vent des peupliers”… “The Wind in the Poplar Trees”?). It was a comedy of sorts, set in the 1960s at a home for aging war veterans. There were only three actors, playing the parts of aforesaid veterans. The plot consisted of them sitting on chairs in the back yard of the home, planning their escape to Indochina, talking about girls and women, and trying to look after each other despite lots of needling. Oh, and there’s a stone dog. He’s important.

It was funnier that I had expected, though I’m not sure if “comedy” is the right word for it… “humorous drama” might be more precise. In any case, it was well-written, well-acted and very much worth seeing. Haven’t been to the theater in a long while.

Tonight we’re off to see Leonard Cohen at the Hartwall Arena. I’m not an absolutely rabid fan, but do like many of his songs (the best of which are quite brilliant)… and Janka like his music a lot, so I grabbed tickets the moment they became available. We’ll see. Haven’t seen him live before, but by all accounts he is still in great touring shape and tends to play long gigs (2.5 - 3 hours). Not bad for a 75yr(?) old.

Did the political compass test. The results were not exactly a surprise to me. Janka reports the same.

If I could vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, I’d vote for Obama no question. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a U.S. presidential candidate who is smart, articulate and educated – and has views and opinions that I can to a large part support. Sure, there are things I disagree with (would be a wonder if not), but in general… I think that there is a real chance that he could swing the U.S. around for the better if he’s elected. Here’s hoping.

Not that McCain is an idiot; it’s just that he’s largely from the stock Republican mold, and would likely keep doing the same old, same old… and that “same old” has driven the U.S. deep into the gutter during the past 8 years. In addition, his choice of running mate is nothing short of a disaster; Palin has proven to be even more of a mental midget than Dan Quale was, and that’s saying a lot. She’s so totally obviously out of her depth (by miles), you’d almost be tempted to feel sorry for her… except that she could have done the right thing and said “no” when asked, and her past history has proven her to be a mean-spirited bitch (not to mince words) who has misused her power while in office. I’m not even sure she realizes how unqualified she is… unqualified people rarely do. Oh, and she honestly believes that humans walked the Earth the same time as dinosaurs did. And she’s protected from witchcraft (must come in handy all the time). So no, I’m not feeling sorry for her. Quite the opposite, I’ll be gleefully giggling if (when) she crashes and burns.

Honestly, the woman is dumber than a sack of rocks. Try this. Or this. Or this. Heard enough gibberish yet? Her foreign experience credentials are based on Alaska being “right over the border from Russia (and Putin’s head)”? She reads all the newspapers? But can’t name a single one? What the fuck?

If I was an American, I’d be insulted that this moron was being moninated for one of the most important jobs in the country. Think about it. If McCain is elected and kicks the bucket, this woman would be president. If that doesn’t scare you… I got nothing.

Sure, in a Disney movie this bimbo would prove to be a surprise hit, would reorganize and clean up Washington, and become the darling of millions (ending the movie with parades and cheering crowds). Life, unfortunately, tends to be more David Fincher (or David Lynch, at times) than Disney. We’ve already seen what a cognitively challenged president with zero intellectual curiosity can do to a country. We don’t need to see it again to know it’s a bad idea.

Why am I following the U.S. presidential elections? Partly because it’s great entertainment, partly because I really would like to see Obama in office, and partly because the result of these elections will have a global effect (whatever happens). The U.S. is just too big to ignore, even here in politically boring Finland.

Standing at the punch table swallowing punch
can’t pay attention to the sound of anyone
a little more stupid, a little more scared
every minute more unprepared

I wanna hurry home to you
put on a slow, dumb show for you
and crack you up

You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years

– The National, “Slow Show”

It struck me again, while I was wandering around Prague feeling at times pretty drawn out and out of synch with everything, how happy I am for having married Janka. Though she’d possibly deny it and find the notion funny, she provides stability and a centerpoint at times when I’m feeling not at all stable myself, without restricting me in any way. I can’t begin to express how much that means to me… and even though I was blessed with very cool traveling companions on the Prague trip, I do wish I could have had her along with me on the road. Thanks, love, for being… you. And for being there for me when I need it.

Slow Show captures a vignette of this, without quite being a traditional love song.

Fortunately I’ve done PC upgrades often enough to expect trouble automatically, so when I upgraded my home computer with a new motherboard, new memory and a new graphics card I wasn’t expecting a smooth ride. The cause for the upgrade was my desire for more gaming graphics power, and since my old mobo had AGP/DDR connections this seemed like a good time to also upgrade to a modern PCIe/DDR2 motherboard. So I did.

Installation went fine mechanically, though my microATX case is a bit cramped. Still, everything fit after some tweaking. When I booted up to Win XP I got what I was halfway expecting: a boot failure, due to the changed chipset etc (boot gets going, then stops and the thing reboots). So I’ll need to try and repair the rig with a Windows XP install disk in repair mode, fair enough – and if all else fails I have backups of the important stuff and can always do a clean reinstall.

Next up, boot to Linux. That failed too, complaining about failure to detect (SATA) disk. After some cursing (I was sure I had remembered to compile in the needed drivers), I discovered that the BIOS defaults to non-native SATA mode for backwards compatibility reasons. Duh. After fixing that, Linux booted fine to text mode. Hooray! X11 didn’t start up, but that was to be expected.

The next day I tried to get X to work, and finally had to revert to the base “vesa” driver – the current incarnation of the Gentoo “ati” and/or “radeonhd” drivers don’t support the 4850HD yet, and the ATI binary drivers aren’t compatible with the recently-released xorg 1.5.0 I’m running. Oh well, at least I get X/KDE via the vesa driver, it’s not like I need accelerated graphics in Linux much anyway right now.

Whle I was doing this the machine froze up a few times, which started to worry me. So I did the first thing I always do when random freezes happen: I fired up memtest86+. Lo and behold, it started showing red “memory fail” results almost at once. I tried with the memory in different slots, and with different memory timings. No go. In the end I had to concude that the memory was just plain bad. That, or there’s some wierd incompatibility with my new motherboard which should support DDR2 800 dual channel according to specs.

…so today it was back to Verkkokauppa. After explaining the situation I got a refund on the memory and grabbed a replacement 2GB from the store – this time “plain basic” DD2 667, in case it’s some motherboard bug with the 800’s or something. Tonight, if I have time, I’ll try things out again.

“If I have time” because my flight to Prague for the VTES EC tournament leaves pretty early tomorrow morning and I still have a ton of prep plus packing to do for that. Looking forward to the trip; I have three more or less tournament-ready decks with me and intend to quickly put together a few more decks for casual play. Never been to Prague before, I’m told it’s a great city though I hear varying opinions about how expensive it is nowadays. I guess it can’t be too bad since I’m coming from Helsinki, one of the most expensive cities in the world at the moment. Hell, even Paris didn’t seem bad in comparison.

Our company moved from Innopoli 2 to Spektri last Friday (across the Ring I road, maybe half a kilometer). It was supposed to be a fast and easy move, but thanks to an understaffed moving company staffed with people from the very shallow end of the gene pool, it actually took well into the evening before we have all the stuff moved over.

Ignoring the moving hassle it’s all good. The new office is 2-3x bigger than the old one and so much nicer. It’s quiet and we have the place to ourselves instead of being situated along a communal corridor like in Innopoli. Spektri has a very nice gym available (with sauna), and the whole place feels like an actual office instead of the cubicle barracks that Innopoli feels like. In addition, there’s both parking space available and a bus stop right outside. Oh, and we’re no longer limited to two caffeterias with crap quality-vs-price ratios. No complaints here.

A quick “what’s up” note, this. Ropecon 2008 came and went, I had a lot of fun despite getting very little sleep. The traditional big VTES tournament was a success once again, I now have a tournament report available for that. The other highlight of the con, for me, was managing to attend Greg Stolze’s demo of his new game, A Dirty World. It was actually the first convention rpg game that I have ever attended, and boy was it worth it. Besides being a kick-ass game designer, Greg proved to be a very cool guy and extremely competent GM. I had a ton of fun playing a heroin-addicted femme fatale…

The rest of the week has been spent in recovery, of sorts. Janka and I are both on vacation now, so we’ve just taken it easy for a while. That said, it feels like it’s been an extremely busy week, I’ve continually been doing something and feel that I managed to only do a small portion of the stuff I had intended. So it goes.

We decided that we needed a short break from all this, so we booked a flight to Paris – leaves tomorrow morning, back on Saturday. It’s been… what, 30 years since I was last there, so I don’t remember much anything, and Janka’s never been there at all. So we’ll spend three days doing the tourist things (Louvre, Notre Dame, the Catacombs, etc) while trying to get by on our extremely limited French vocabulary. Should be fun. I’m trying (in vain) to remember the basic rudiments of French verbs…. and since I know that’s doomed to failure, I’m taking along a phrase book and trying to resist the urge to go for a Monty Python French accent.

Back by the weekend.

Rounding up a week of vacation for me was Finncon (the annual Finnish science fiction convention) at Tampere. No “must meet” authors there this time around, but since our summer place is near Tampere anyway we decided to go, spending the nights at out place. Glad we did, Finncon was ok but nothing special and the merged Animecon meant that the place was crawling with (mostly very young) anime/mange fans. I joked that my “Finncon ‘91” t-shirt was older than the median age there…

…but that didn’t really stop me enjoying the con, mostly as a “relaxing weekend away from home”. Attended some entertaining talks and panels, saw a few nice short films and met some people I don’t otherwise see all that often – and we must not forget the artistic highlight of the con, the no-budget short film “Atlantiksen Jumala” from Petri Hiltunen and the gang. Horribly and intentionally bad as always, but also entertaining because of that.

Nice vacation week otherwise, too. Time sped by fast, I managed to do a very small fragment of the things I had intended to do but that’s normal. Now it’s back to work for a couple of busy weeks, then two more weeks of vacation right after Ropecon.