So I’ve been scheming about my upgrade plans for some time now, and today I decided to take a preliminary look at what it might cost to put my plans into fruition. I’m not entirely sure if I am going to go ahead with these upgrades; I have to take a look if there is no next generation hardware around the corner; If there is, I might actually show a bit of common sense and wait!

A few notes:

• The extra RAM would bring the total RAM to 4GB. Considering how cheap DDR2 RAM is these days, I might also get rid of my current RAM and buy 4GB of speedier memory; This mostly depends on what my motherboard will eat.
• My motherboard has surround sound audio support on board, but I’m considering the option of getting a sexy sound card. I’ve not really looked at what I’d want to buy, though.
• My XBOX 360 is broken, although I should be able to fix it. However, I always had the plan of buying a second XBOX 360, mostly because my original XBOX 360 is running hacked firmware, and I’m not going to risk going online with that one. Furthermore, my parents bought a 46″ Sony Bravia, which is Full HD, so it would be rather nice to have an XBOX with HDMI output so I can attach it to the TV.

With these notes in mind, there are some other items to shove onto the previous list.

Since the 122.20 Euro Creative SB X-FI Xtreme Gamer Fatality Professional is obviously far too cheap to be something I’d buy, I’m also listing a nice little Creative SB X-FI Elite Pro to consider as an alternative.

All in all, this is slightly more than I had originally anticipated, but it’s still well within the amount of money I expect to have earned/earn from my work placement. It’s also slightly ironic to realize that the dual core Geforce 9800 GTX actually costs a good 130 euros less than what I originally paid for my Geforce 8800 GTX! Surely that can’t be right?

Update just now found some information about the new ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 which is supposedly the fastest card available at this time.
I’m assuming nVidia will have something interesting around the corner, so at any rate I’m going to wait with the upgrade until I’ve looked into that matter with greater detail.

If I succeed in waking up on time to catch my bus tomorrow (which leaves at 7:55 AM so I’ll have to get up around 7 at the latest, which is absolute torture for me), I shall be off to the second annual TT-Forums UK Meet, which will this time be taking place in London! I’m flying from Helsinki-Vantaa airport to London Heathrow on Scandinavian Airlines, and crashing at Andel’s crib.

Then on Sunday I’ll be flying from London Stansted to Eindhoven Airport, on Ryanair, in order to spend some time in the Netherlands. Apart from working on my report and handing it in, I shall also be attending the TT-Forums Dutch meet in Utrecht, under the condition that it’s actually going to be happening.

Then on the Friday following all that, I shall be flying back to Finland from Schiphol Airport on Finnair.

Most exciting! I just hope I’ll manage to get everything packed in time, and as I said, I hope I’ll wake up D:

Unpacking presents
Click for a bigger version.

On the 20th of June, I turned 20 years old. Because of various reasons, we celebrated my birthday on the evening of the 19th. Sander and Roel tricked me into coming along to the local Irish pub, Molly’s, to watch the football match (Portugal - Germany).
All my friends from Salo were in the pub with me. Then at 12:00 AM “Happy Birthday” was sung and I was presented with some presents.

Not much later we all headed on home, and whilst sitting in the living room of one of the apartments (the replacement Common Room ever since the janitor locked our actual common room due to ‘mischief’), it turned out that Aida had baked pie!

All in all a very good birthday, especially considering the fact that I did not expect any celebrations whatsoever.

Then, on Monday, I went to the hairdresser. Forced by my friends here in Finland, I let said hairdresser cut off a considerable amount of hair.
Unlike last time, I did get the chance to take ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures.

Before and after pictures. Click to enlarge.

So today I decided that it was time to add another line of defence. Yes, I’ve added CAPTCHAs to the website.

I know that many people find these annoying. Especially the ones on such websites as RapidShare are thoroughly annoying and sometimes in fact impossible.
This one, however, is not so bad. For starters, the images are actually quite readable. This may make it easier for bots to automatically solve them as well, but in that case I still have Akismet to catch them in the act.

What really makes the CAPTCHAs I use better than most, however, is that I’ve gone for reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a captcha system (by the original inventor of CAPTCHAs) where the users actually help with digitizing books.

At school, I once attended a presentation by the inventor of CAPTCHAs, and he spoke of the various plans he had for ‘Human Computation’. One of these what is now known as reCAPTCHA, but another one of these was what is now known as the Google Image Labeler - a game which is addictive to play and provides google with labels to images for their image search at the same time.

So I hope these CAPTCHAs won’t annoy anyone. It’s not like there are that many people posting comments on here anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

Spencer Bear.
Click for a bigger version.

I may also have said something about setting one on fire if I did still have a teddy bear…

As you may or may not know, I’m turning 20 years old on Friday the 20th of June.
Today someone rang the doorbell, and when I opened it it turned out to be the mail man with a package.

After opening it I found the object you see to the right (unless you’re reading this on planet.tt-forums.net in which case it’s somewhere above this text; Screw you!), together with the note you see below:

The card that came with it. Nice HTML escaping!

Thank you Tenebrae for your gift! And after noticing how incredibly soft it is, I promise not to set it on fire

A 46″ Sony Bravia is now making the living room in the Netherlands so much more aesthetically pleasing…

The box the TV came in. Humongous! Click for a bigger version.

And here it is in the living room! Click for a bigger version.

The furniture under it is of course a temporary piece.

One of the guys living in the same house called the janitor and acted like he lived in the room of one of the French guys and that he had forgotten his key and was as such locked out. The janitor here has no idea who lives where, so he opened the door without asking… Quite a large security issue, but that’s not really relevant now.

In a team effort, we moved everything out of his room. Laptops, TV, Wii, Desk, Bed, Couch… Everything. Some of the people then continued to inflate some condoms and hang them around the room. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they did that latter, but whatever.

So today (or technically yesterday) ‘the French’ returned, so we got ready outside the window of his room in order to watch (and record) his response.
Whilst standing there waiting, I put my hands in my pockets, because it was cold. When doing so I felt two small bits of plastic. Not knowing what they were, I took them out:

Sorry for the poor quality, it was dark and I was too lazy to switch on the lights.

The timing was perfect, too, because tomorrow I’m going on a trip to Riga, Latvia, for three days. Great! Luckily I still have my credit card, but that’ll cost me more money. Furthermore it’ll take some time to get a replacement - especially when factoring in the Finland issue.

Anyway, since I was ordering a new one, I went and designed my own card in the process. It was only ~2 euros more to make my card totally awesome and unique! Behold:

Look familiar?

Watch it if you’ve got 7-or-so minutes of time to spend.

That is all.

On Wednesday, March 31, the pagan/satanic (and Roman Catholic, but this is Finland, damn it!) holiday of Vappu, or ‘Walpurgis Night‘ is celebrated in various countries; mostly in northern Europe.

Unfortunately I do not currently have any pictures of the events, because I don’t have a proper camera myself, and I haven’t leeched any pictures from my friends yet.

In my particular case, the day started with going to work while enduring very nice temperatures (some 22 °C) and sun. During lunch time, my boss came around to see what we were up to, and told us we had to leave early that day so that we could go to Turku and get drunk (although not with those words).
My boss is a nice man.

Some of the other residents of Hakastaronkatu 15, or Hakis as we affectionately call it, had made plans which included staying in a hotel in down town Turku. Three minutes of enquiry later, it was decreed that I would join them in Turku for the traditional consumption of alcohol and the picnic in the park, the day after.

That afternoon we took the train to Turku, dropped off our stuff at the hotel, and went to the Turku marketplace, where something like 30,000+ people had gathered (I’m not sure what the exact numbers were; There may have been many more people around) for a variety of traditions.

After some time of standing around, 98% of the people present suddenly got out some white student caps and put them on after frantically waving them in the air. One of the Spanish students I was travelling with told me what they were - basically, the idea is that you get them when you graduate from senior high school. You are only allowed to wear them during Vappu, and you are not allowed to wash them - ever. Some people clearly lived by the latter rule, because some of them were so dirty that it could only have gotten that way by enduring something like a stream of puke landing on it…

Anyway, all the people started moving to the river side for another Vappu tradition: the washing of statues. Don’t ask me why they do it, but they do it. In this particular case, it was being washed by some dentistry students, so they used a gigantic toothbrush.

After these events, we went to have some food at a Grilli, which is a bit like a mix between a snack bar and a hot dog stand. Here we met some other people from the loverly town of Salo, as well as some Dutch people we had met some weeks before then. Small world.

Later that night we went clubbing. First we tried to get into a place called Onnela; Where the age limit was 20. I could not get in with my measly 19 years-and-10-months of time spent as a living being, so we tried another place. Åbo Diskotek (Åbo is Swedish for Turku) had an age limit of 22. Standing in line hand-in-hand with one of the girls of our little entourage, I got in without anyone asking me for identification…

Anyway, since I was pretty tired (mostly due to a drinking game which went on until 2:50 the night before), I didn’t really have that much of a good time there, but it was fun none the less. Later that night we went to the hotel to sleep.

The next day, we had a picnic, which is a tradition on May Day, the national holiday on the first of May. The weather was nice, so there, again, were many thousands of people present in the park.
Some horribly emo band played for an hour, and then a bit later some weird retro-electro-funk-pop ensamble played a few songs, just before we decided to head on home.

In the train, I had to show the conductor my student card which gets me a discount for the public transport system. When we got out of the train, I walked for some 100 meters before realizing that the pocket that normally contains my wallet, felt surprisingly devoid of any contents. My heart rate suddenly shot up, because my wallet contains my driver’s license, credit card, bank card, insurance card, student cards, etcetera.

Realizing that I had left my wallet in the train, I went back to the station. There, the woman behind the desk managed to contact the train. Luckily you buy tickets for specific wagons/seats when you get a ticket before entering the train, meaning that I could pretty specifically tell the conductor in the train where to look for my wallet.
Three minutes later, he called back to tell me that he found the wallet. The train he was on would be going through Salo on it’s return journey again at 9:30 PM, so if I could be at the station at that time, I could get my wallet back.

Obviously, this quickly made me a very relieved person. Later that evening I did return to the station, met the conductor (he actually recognized me immediately), and got my wallet back, contents very much present and intact. I’m 100% sure that, in the Netherlands, I would never have gotten back my wallet. Not only would it not have been possible to contact the train again - because there’s a train every 10 minutes or so - but it would also be impossible to tell the conductor in the train exactly where I was sitting.
Not to mention not-so-honest people getting their hands of the thing first.

It was actually enabled yesterday, but because I went to celebrate Vappu in Turku with friends from my street, I did not actually get to use it until today.

More on the said festivities in a later post.