Well, my trusty old computer finally drew its last breath, curled up and died. Just to take a wild guess at what's busted, I'd go for motherboard and processor, system drive and power source. Yep.. all of the above. There had been problems before, but this time the cranky old machine defied all attempts to resuscitate it. Bugger.

But, as good news, now i got myself a brand new 'puter because of the kindness of an Anonymous Sponsor (thanks, Dad ) The only problem is that my brand-spanking-new Acer Aspire E380 has Windows Vista (TM) installed, and I'm beginning to see why I've heard so many people complaining about it... Maybe i should just learn to use Linux or something.

May is getting awfully close to it's end and this apartment has to be empty and thoroughly cleaned by Friday.. I'm moving to Helsinki for the summer, but I'm back here again by the end of August. This whole moving business really sucks. It's been raining all day here and there is a sense of thunder in the air.. My head has been aching constantly today and I haven't been able to do anything even remotely productive. All this crap should be checked, packed and all useless stuff thrown away, but I barely manage to muster the energy for writing this.

Well, I'll get back to the joyous endeavour of trying to get programs installed and working on this new PC.. that is, if I can even find half of the installation disks... and probably most of my old programs are too old to work with Vista anyway

Take care, you all and don't get sick!

This has been one lousy day..

I must have caught some nasty somach-flu cooties last weekend or something.. This day has reminded me of some of the worst hangovers I've ever had, just without the getting-drunk part My stomach is all turned inside out and I've had the pleasure (_not_) of having diarrhea all day. My knees are all wobbly, my head dizzy and hurting, my body aches all over and I got hot and cold waves.. I'm freezing one moment and pushing sweat the next..

I heard that one of my friends, who attended the same wedding last weekend as I did, has similar symptoms, only a bit worse.. he had to sleep last night on the bathroom floor and had over 38 degrees fever.. I truly do wish that I don't get it as bad..

As an added bonus, I have to go to school tomorrow, because I have a very important work in progress, by which I'm going to be graded, and I've spent a couple of hours adjusting a piece of metal to a milling cutter so that it is absolutely straight, and already started working on it.. If the piece is there, no-one else can use the machine, and if the piece is taken out, I have to do all the adjusting again when I put it back and I probably can't get it aligned just the same way again, which means there is a LOT of wasted effort..

Hmph.. I see it's been again over 2 months since my last post

I really hate this place.. this pimple in the ass-end of nowhere, where I have to live because the school happens to be here. I can't fathom why they can't have the school in some bigger town.. like Tampere or Helsinki. It gets truly boring at nights here, and all you can do is either go to the only bar in town and drink away what little money you have or stay at home and browse the Net..

I'm really glad I'm leaving tomorrow for Helsinki to spend some time with my dearest and celebrate the 1st of May. I guess it's still called "labour day" in english calendars here, but it's become more a celebration for students and young people.. sort of the only annual carnival here in Finland. Most people have a rough party the night before, drinking bubbly and blowing balloons. The 1st of May is usually spent going to town, some students even enjoy the "traditional" breakfast of herring sandwiches that are supposed to help your hangover. People go to have walks in parks or the marketplace and every street corner is packed with bands playing and people selling cheap carnival crap and helium balloons. We're going to have a 1st of May lunch with our in-laws and some of their relatives. It's usually quite fun and someone else pays for the food

Also, next saturday, I'm going to be knighted. (Well, sort of, anyway.. It's not an official title like the Knights of the Realm in UK and I can't start going around calling myself "Sir" on anything...) I've been a member of the Finnish branch of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem Knights Hospitallers (OSJ) for some time and now they are going to hold a festive investiture in which me and another member are going to be granted the rank of a Knight. There was another big investiture in Denmark the last summer, but we couldn't attend there, so now we have our own. I think it's going to be quite nice anyway, even if it's not as big an accoasion as the one last summer. We do have some honored guests attending, the Nordic prior from Denmark and Grand Commander from Malta.

I know it can be disputed whether the OSJ is an "official" order, since there are many rivaling orders of Saint John.. and OSJ is mainly a charity association rather than a "real" knightly order, but I think we have at least as good a claim to being true successors of the original hospitaller knights of Malta as any of the other branches. Since Napoleon exiled the knights from Malta, they went to many different locations and many kept the order alive at their own location, thus creating several "branches" of the original order, each of which nowadays often claim to be the only true successors of the original Knights Hospitallers... But anyway, it's a festive occasion and a good excuse to wear formal white tie jacket and to have a pretty medallion hung in your neck to be worn with much pomp and circumstance.

I wish a happy upcoming weekend to you all, and a joyous 1st of May celebration if it is your custom.

I know it's kind of lame, but I'd still like to wish you all

A VERY HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

In Finland we don't really call it valentine's day, and most of us don't even know who or what Valentine is, but here we celebrate this day calling it "Friend's Day". This day we give our best wishes to our friends and loved ones, give maybe little gifts or something like that. This day is important to me, because this is the one day, when I try to give thought to ALL my friends, and if there is someone I haven't communicated with for a long time, I try at least to send an SMS greeting with my mobile.

On this day, everyone should take a little time to reflect how lucky they are to have friends. People, who support you when your'e down, people, who don't feel embarassed to be themselves in your company. People, who you can share your feelings with. Remember your friends and give them a little greeting, letting them know that you still exist and care about them.

Okay.. this is going to be another rant.

I visited a friend this week and he said he had something really cool to show me. He went fishing around his closet and came up with an old military rifle. He showed it to me and asked: "Cool, isn't it?". Here's the conversation that followed between myself (me) and my friend (F):

me: Does it work?
F: Of course not.. it's deactivated. (meaning that the cartridge chamber has been welded shut and a large part of the bolt has been sawed off to make it unable to function)
me: Why? It would be much cooler if it could still work.
F: No it wouldn't.. working guns are dangerous and people get injured or killed with them. I don't like guns that shoot.
me: I'm a bit confused now.. you don't like guns, but yet you have this one and you think it's cool?
F: This is different. It's been deactivated so there's no way you can even accidentally shoot with this one. This gun is safe, and nobody will get hurt with it. And it looks cool.
me: Umm... so, guns are OK, if you can't use them, but not OK, if they can be used?
F: Yeah.. I'm a pacifist, but I just like the way guns look.

This just really rubs my noggin the wrong way. I can deal with pacifists, no problem there, I can deal with gun enthusiasts, no prob there either. But a pacifist that likes guns as long as they can't shoot. That's just perverse.

Why do guns look cool? Because guns look dangerous, efficient and threatening. If a gun doesn't look like a gun, it doesn't look cool, it looks ridiculous. A gun is supposed to look like it's made to spit deadly projectiles to a long distance. It's a simple design matter of "form follows function". But if you take away the function, the form has no longer any use. It's like saying: "I like stallions, because they look so virile and masculine.. so very MALE. I got myself a stallion, but I had him castrated because wouldn't want him to accidentally impregnate some mare."

A stallion with no nuts is no longer a stallion, it's a gelding. A gun that has been deactivated is no longer a gun, it's a paperweight.

In my opinion, if you admire the way guns look, you should also acknowledge and accept the purpose they were made for. If you don't like people shooting at things, then you shouldn't like guns at all. Maybe I'm seeing things a bit black-and-white, but I think that if you like the way guns look, you should also at least accept shooting.. if not hunting, at least target practise.

I just think there is no point in deactivating guns. I can relate to the people that want deactivated guns for show, if they are unable to aquire licences for functional guns, but still.. every gun is essentially a result of countless hours of design, experimenting and craftmanship, with the goal of creating a well-working piece of machinery that shoots bullets accurately. Deactivating a gun is like taking the value away from the process of bringing the gun to existence in the first place.

Collecting deactivated guns is like collecting cars with their axles welded in place so the wheels can't rotate and their engines broken so they can't run. It's a whole different thing entirely when you collect cars and you are not allowed to drive them, but you still know that every one of them is in perfect working shape. I know some old men who painstakingly polish small pieces of an antique automobile's engine knowing that IF they wanted to start it, the engine would purr like a kitten, but they don't want to start it, because the whole point is to HAVE the car, not to use it.

I think that if you should collect guns, every gun should be in fully functional condition to honor the guns purpose as functional objects, even if you wouldn't ever fire a single shot with them. Of course, most of the people who collect guns, usually also like to shoot with them. But the point is not taking away the functionality by deactivating them to be mere showpieces.

Here I started to write about who should and who should not be allowed to own guns and the responsibility of gun owners and such matters, but since that strays a bit off the topic and this rant is very long even as it is, I'll save it to another time. Thanks for your patience.

This time I'm going to humour you with such an interesting subject as Temperature scales. Isn't that fascinating? (none of you will read this any further, I know...)

Mainly I'm going to rant about how ridiculous I find the Fahrenheit scale. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

I think that the Fahrenheit scale lacks ANY logical reference points as to why it exists or where does it come from. It's all fine and dandy that the boiling and freezing points of water are EXACTLY 180 degrees apart, but it seems more a coincidence.. since it's 180 degrees from 32 to 212, which are no kind of logical numbers. There are several very interesting stories about how Fahrenheit created his scale here (Wikipedia again, look in the "history" part of the article), but none of them seem any less absurd than others. If I invented a temperature scale that had the zero point set to the coldest temperature I've been able to measure inside my refridgerator's ice box and 100 degrees se to the temperature of my computer's hard drive on the verge of a breakdown, I would be called nuts and possibly get locked away somewhere where I can't harm myself or anyone else. But then again.. I'm not a famous Polish-German physicist.

Anyway, if a Polish-German guy thinks up a seemingly randomly selected temperature scale in 1724 and only 20 years later Anders Celsius comes up with a reasonable scale with 0 and 100 degree points fixed to such an easily measured and reproduced things as the freezing and boiling of water, why almost 300 years later a huge part of the world's populace (the U.S.) still use the Fahrenheit scale?

</end rant>

As a side note concerning temperatures, it finally seems like winter really has arrived. For about a week now it's been below -10 and most mornings when I walk to school the air could be called "crispy". I hate the feeling when every time I breathe in through my nose I feel the little hairs inside it freeze.

Furthermore, I think Fahrenheit was a pushover, if he set the zero point of his scale to the coldest outdoor temperature he could measure, the "harsh" winter of 1708-1709 in Gdansk, with temperature extremes such as -17,3 degrees Celsius. HAH! Just this week there were temperatures ranging from -15 to -21 here in Ikaalinen and below -26 in Oulu, a few hundred km north from here. In Sodankylä it was colder than -30 and it still isn't a very "harsh" winter. This is normal. OK, this isn't Poland, but it's not so far away.

In case any of you were wondering what it is that gunsmiths do, here's an example:



The parts belong to a 9mm Jericho (Baby Eagle) pistol. The original parts were broken or missing, so I had to make new ones. These parts were simple enough to do by hand rather than order spare parts from somewhere and wait for them to arrive. The ruler you see above the parts has the measurements in millimeters (for those unfamiliar with the metric system, one inch is about 25mm). All parts are handmade from alloy steel, hardened and tempered with an acetylene welding torch. The part on the left was so small that it couldn't be polished properly on this side. The thicker part is 2mm and the thinner only 1mm thick.

As a sidenote, it seems that winter has finally arrived here. Now we have snow and everything. Yay!

Yay!

Our car was found, and it was mostly OK, save for a small dent near the door's lock and a busted ignition lock. The spare gas canister and a pair of old smelly jogging shoes were also missing and the battery was dead, but other than that, everything seemed to be in order. It appears that someone just needed a ride home on new year's eve.

The car was found in Kivikko, near Kontula in Helsinki.. a region notorious for housing many long-term unemployed and lots of immigrants. A place where you'd almost expect stolen cars to be found in.

Otherwise I'm fine but slightly depressed again. I can't muster the energy to clean up the pigsty I live in and I don't have enough money to pay all the bills. That sucks.

Well, there hasn't been more than little over a week since my last confession, but this time there is something to tell.

The new year started off well otherwise, except that our car was stolen.

We spent the last days of Christmas at my parents' house, then drove almost 200 miles back to Helsinki on Dec 27th. I drove the car to a nearby free parking lot and left it there. When we were going to have a dinner with some friends a few days ago, I went off to get the car and I got this funny feeling on the way to the parking lot that 'what if the car wasn't there' -kind of thing. I thought it was funny because I normally don't think of such things, but this time I did, and when I got there, the car was gone.

My first reaction was that of total disbelief, running through all possibilities of where else I could have left the car and if I just didn't recall the place of the car correctly. A few minutes of hard thinking led to the inevitable conclusion that the vehicle must be stolen. There was nothing more to be done than to phone the police.

The car was a '90 Honda Civic, so it wasn't a great financial loss as such, but we need a car and now we have none. And we can't afford to get one. I think even if we manage to get some money for the stolen car from the insurance company, it still wouldn't be enough to get another one.. save for a totally rusted Russian tin can of bolts and nuts..

The person/s behind this are probably some drunk punks who decided to go for a joyride on new year's eve or criminals who need a car for some gig or other. The worst case would probably be the joyriders, because then the car might not be totally smashed up, and then the insurance company wouldn't pay for irreparable damage but would give just a little money but not really enough to fix the car properly.

Well, anyway, it's going to cost and that sucks.

I further continue to excel in posting at inconceivably long intervals. My last blog entry was the day after my birthday, and since it's past boxing day now, it's been (again) over two months. Call me a lazy bastard, but that just seems to be the state of things, no matter how hard I try to be more active.

Christmas was pretty much OK. We had to travel a bit to and fro, but otherwise it went as could be expected. Since it seems an uncanny task to get both our parents to celebrate Christmas in the same location, we were doomed to commute between Lahti (a friend gave us tickets to a very nice choir concert held the day before Christmas Eve), Helsinki (Christmas Eve) and Tampere (Christmas day and the day after that) and then back to Helsinki again.

The main drawback, however seems to be the lack of christmas spirit. I blame it to the lack of snow. It just doesn't feel like Christmas, to one used to at least ten inches of snow in December, if there is hardly any snow at all. I'm really grateful that the temperatures at least have dropped to slight freeze, since the beginning of December saw temperatures regularly between 7 and 10 degrees Centigrade.

It seems unbelieveable, that just in November, winter came almost overnight, as it snowed for almost two whole days in row, temperature dropped from Septempber-like +5 degrees readings to -10 or -15 degrees. The amount of snow from that single snowfall exceeded 20 inches (that's right, not centimeters but inches) in some places. And all that came down in less than 40 hours. Suddenly a long, dreary, dark and sodden fall had turned into a dazzling white winter.

It lasted for almost a week and then it all melted away.

The two first weeks of December were back to +7 to +10 degrees daily, snow melted away and grass became green again and continued to grow. Even birds, confused started to migrate to erratic directions, as if uncertain if they should stay here or go south for the winter. It all just seemed unreal. I might be able to produce pictures of the striking contrast between November and December, if i manage to find some from my friends.


Bah.. I really disappoint myself. It took me over two months to write another blog post and now I've babbled on about the weather. Could you get any more dull than that? I doubt any of you will ever read this post this far.

Anyway, take care, all and I wish you all best of luck to the beginning of the New Year.