Nightless Night

I just like the Finnish summer nights. Here's a picture I took outside fifteen minutes ago (at 11 pm) while I was sitting outside and having a glass of wine (I guess a bottle of beer would be more normal in Finland). Anyway, you can still see a glimpse of sunlight behind the trees on the left.

My Brain Usage Profile

Auditory : 16%
Visual : 83%
Left : 66%
Right : 33%

JMTee, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant and a predominantly visual learner, an interesting blend of characteristics!

You are an intensely visual person, active and continuously searching. As such, there is no rhythm or beat to limit your learning. You are constantly absorbing and imaging. Your tendency to be left- hemisphere dominant, however, creates some difficulties. You continue to attempt to structure all that input and categorize it, at the same time continuing to seek out new input while "reflecting" in what you have already gained.

With your visual orientation absorbing so much input, you sometimes utilize your left-brain focus to identify logical aspects of what you perceive and may become overwhelmed by details.

When faced with situations where you have to rely on verbal input exclu- sively, you may find yourself needing to work more on maintain- ing an "overview" or perspective in order to fully grasp the material. It is likely that "sketching out" a representation of material that you are listening to will enhance your understanding and recall of the material. Drawing diagrams and note- taking allow you to "see" the relationships and absorb them more fully.

You tend to focus on details and are generally logical and organized. You have an intensity which is evident to others and yet can feel comfortable with the applied aspects of learning, the practical.

Given that you are somewhat goal-directed, the difficulty with being so visual is that you continuously "see" new goals and thus may be drawn from one to the other or at least forced to think about them within present structures. Because of your visual processing mode, you are regularly faced with tolerating and integrating ambiguity, a process which disrupts the equilibrium of your left-hemisphere preeminence.

It is likely that you are restless continuously and do not feel challenged. You may well explore engaging in activities which enhance right-hemisphere functioning which would reduce some of the tension you might currently be experiencing.

You can take the test yourself here. [Via Chew's Place]

S�rk�nniemi

One of the summer holiday's unavoidable things is to take the kids to the amusement park... and that's going to happen today. As you've probably guessed, I'm not exactly thrilled, but I guess it's better to get it done and over with... :-)

Jobs' Keynote on the Way

Steve Jobs' WWDC Keynote is going on and you can see what's going on at MacRumors' WWDC 2003 coverage page. No QuickTime stream yet.

And the Apple Store is down indicating that there will be new hardware on the way...

Yes, there will be new chip! It will be called G5. 'We are delivering today - the Worlds Fastest Personal Computer', says Steve. 1.6GHz $1999,1.8GHz $2399, Dual 2GHz $2999. Shipping in August. '3GHz in 12 months!'

(Not very good) pics of the new G5 towers can be found here.

The Keynote is over. Now we just have to wait for the Apple site and Store to be updated... Apple site now updated with all the goodies.

At the moment downloading Safari 1.0 (i.e. no more betas anymore).

And now I'm writing this in Safari 1.0 (v85). The previous Beta build was v74, so there has obviously been some work done; mainly under the bonnet I guess, since there are not any visible differences... at least I haven't spotted any yet.

What Country Am I?

You're Canada!

People make fun of you a lot, but they're stupid because you've
got a much better life than they do.  In fact, they're probably just jealous.
 You believe in crazy things like human rights and health care and not
dying in the streets, and you end up securing these rights for yourself and
others.  If it weren't for your weird affection for ice hockey, you'd be
the perfect person.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

Canada, eh? Well, suits me fine. There are already quite many of my relatives living there. (Hi guys, if you happen to be reading this!) The only thing is that I really don't have an 'affection' for ice hockey though - so, does that make me a perfect person then? [Tx for the link, Chew]

Yikes!

I've stayed the whole day out and now I've bloody burned myself!

WWDC Keynote Stream

There have been some conflicting reports about the availability of a live stream from Jobs' WWDC keynote, but this looks promising [Tx Velmu]. These are the times for the keynote speech in different time zones:

PDT/'Pacific' (UTC-7): 10:00 AM
MDT/'Mountain' (UTC-6): 11:00 AM
CDT/'Central' (UTC-5): 12:00 PM
EDT/'Eastern' (UTC-4): 1:00 PM
UTC: 5:00 PM

UTC=GMT

The Finnish time is +2 hours to the GMT, but is the summer time taken into account or not?!?

First Day of Holiday

It's eight o'clock in the morning of the first day of my holiday. I've just had a cup of coffee sitting outside in the sunshine and everybody else is still sleeping. Ah, wonderfully peaceful. So, it's definitely not the worst start for a day.

Now playing in iTunes: my own compilation of 21 best songs of Mamba - this is not typical music for me, but it suits perfectly to the moment.

Tonight Apple is expected to introduce PowerMacs with new G5 processors and possibly other goodies at Worldwide Developers Conference 2003. We will also see first glimpse of the new OS X 10.3 codenamed Panther.

Holiday

It's the last day at work before my first two-week summer holiday period, and it has been the normal pre-holiday chaos when trying to get everything sorted out in time. By the way, why is it that every time when you are leaving for holiday, you get these bloody report requests with dead-lines in the middle of your holiday? For this reason I've arrived very early at the office today, so I better get cracking...

P.S. I know that I have not been very active on the blog-front lately, but I hope to be able to do a little bit better during the holiday.

The Boss

Me and 44,000 other people were listening to Bruce Springsteen yesterday night at Helsinki Olympic Stadium. Just before the concert it was raining, but like magic, as the music started at eight o'clock the sun came out. After three hours of new and old songs the concert was over, and there were somewhat varying opinions about it in our party; some said that they wanted even more of the old stuff, but I have to say that I liked what I got. However, since I'm not very familiar with the new album, The Rising, either, it were the old hits that worked best for me too. Especially Thunder Road as a live version was absolutely great - much better than on CD. On the other hand my favourite song, Glory Days, which was the very last song, didn't fare quite as well. Also, the 'light show' at the end was less than spectacular in the 'nightless night' of the Finnish summer ;-)

Sunday Shopping

I'm not sure I like the idea of stores being open on Sundays, but I have to say it was quite nice to do some shopping when the stores were not full-packed with people like on normal days. In addition to clothes (I hate shopping clothes, but you have to do it sometimes) I bought couple of CDs, one being a kind of a 'greatest hits' collection of a Finnish band called Sig, who were active in the first half of the 80s. Hope I didn't cause any irrevocable damage to my 12-year-old son, when I fetched him from his football match and forced him to listen to the music, which he didn't know of - and didn't care for, I have to say. On the other hand, I have to listen to the kids' music more than they have to listen to mine ;-)

But that was earlier, now I've been listening to Bruce Sprinsteen in anticipation of tomorrow's concert in Helsinki. My favourite is still Glory Days

Think I'm going down to the well tonight
and I'm going to drink till I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don't sit
around thinking about it but I probably will

Che


The interesting story behind the famous image of Che Guevara can be read here. [Via Kari T]

Couple of searches in Google produced the original un-cropped picture:

Quark Coming or Not?

The big news from yesterday was that Quark XPress 6 for Mac OS X is shipping within a week, but now MacSlash says it's not the case. I guess we'll see soon.

Incidentally, Quark and MS Outlook mail client are the two biggest reasons keeping our company from going fully OS X.

How Many Blogs and Bloggers?

How big is the blogosphere? What is its shape, color, true nature? Blogcount catalogs efforts to answer these questions. We collect and organize the best reports and analyses on this subject. The answer to these questions and many more might be found at blogcount. [Via pinseri]

Blog Studio

There's a new blogging service called Blog Studio. The basic version is free, and un-like Blogger, it's without ads and works with Safari (I tested it). If you are considering starting a weblog, check it out.

Now playing: well, nothing for me, but my wife is listening to Hagnesta Hill by Kent - and Kent, as I have mentioned before, is of course an excellent choice for anybody. Kent is also one of the few common favourites me and my wife have, when it comes to music ;-)

Remember to Fix Those Permissions

This morning, when I turned on the PowerBook (actually, since I don't ever turn it off, I just woke it from sleep), the Mac OS X automatic software update imposed itself upon me with yet an other update. This time it was a 'Security Update', which I duly installed. The point I want to make, however, is not the update itself, but the fact that I've made it a custom to apply the 'Repair Disk Permissions' each time I install something; just run the 'Disk Utility' application and choose 'First Aid' tab. I've seen this recommended in several places and I've managed to fix some anomalies after applying the 'Repair' option.

Well, that's it for now, have a nice Tuesday, everybody!

Quizilla

As readers of my blog have noticed, I've filled out lots of the more or less sill quizes out there. Only now, however, have I realised that I could make my own quizes at Quizilla! What could be the title? What Macintosh computer are you? What Moomin character are you? Or What Die toten Hosen song suits you the best? Hmm... maybe I have to think about it a bit more.

Hate-Mongering and an Efficient Way to Learn Foreign Language?

Today I've spent some time reading through many Finnish blogs, which I haven't had time to read during the past week. To my disappointment, many of the blogs seem to be still dwelling in the on-going feminsts-vs-male-pigs-vs-humanists-vs-natural-sciences-vs-what-ever dispute which has even turned to 'hate-mongering' in some instances, and which I don't have any great interest to follow.

However, one of the bloggers, Panu of Pl�ki (who's also been contributing to the dispute mentioned above) suggests an interesting method of learning a foreign language. Actually you need to have some knowledge of the language in question in advance; you also need to have a book in that language, a pencil and a dictionary. Here's the method in brief:

Phase one: read or glance through the whole book and underline all unknown words and phrases and also all phrases which you do understand, but which you couldn't have formulated yourself.

Phase two: read the book through with a dictionary. Write unknown words and phrases in the marginals; write also comments to the understandable but difficult looking phrases.

Phase three: read the book once again, this time for its contents - without pen or dictionary.

Panu assures that this is the most effective way to learn a foreign language, and he has apparently taught himself Irish Gaelic this way. Anyway, this methods sounds interesting and I might give it a try some time.

P.S. I didn't pay any attention to the time and realised only after seeing this post go to Monday instead of Sunday, that it's very late. OK, time to go to bed then.

Long Time No Blog

As I mentioned I spent almost the whole of this week abroad, and after coming back home, there was some catching up to do. Even though I was able to read my mail and access the Internet, it was unavoidable that there was some work piling up when I was away from the office, so I've actually worked quite a bit this weekend. Also Apple has released a load of various software updates during this week, which I've now installed. The only one I still won't install at this point in time, is the iTunes 4.0.1 update, which disables the internet streaming of your music (apart from local subnets, that is).

Now, however, things are begining to be back to normal again and I could consider some blogging again.

Just a brief note letting you know that I'm presently on a business trip in Denmark and have not been able to update my blog this week. I will be back home late Thursday night, so I will be back 'on-line' after that time.

By the way, the weather here has been absolutely fantastic - unfortunately I've been staying inside most of the time...

Plea for the Prime Minister

I wrote earlier about the concers of English (and other foreign language) skills of our new Prime Minister, Mrs Anneli J��tteenm�ki. Yesterday evening on TV I saw her speak at the St. Petersburg summit and my concerns grew stronger. If that's how she fares when reading from a paper, I don't dare to think how she manages in ad hoc interviews. Mrs Prime Minister, for Finland's sake, please, take a language course now.