Diary, archive, December 2003
Saturday, December 27th, 2003
Christmas was, it was very nice. We had 13 people on the Christmas eve dinner, it was a bit crowded, but everything went well and we ate much good food. Much of it is still left in the fridge.
Tommi's orc-rpg was today. We had a very good time, but we didn't accomplish our mission. I (or my goblin) survived, with remnants of his army, but most of our force attacking the elven woods was killed. We got something like 30 elves, though. The trolls heading two of four armies proved to be a headache, so I much ignored them and tried to do something sensible. The characters were the captains of armies with a mission to kill a big elf in the woods doing a spell. Well, we did got one wizard, but never found the actual place where the big baddies were, and my goblin was forced to escape with just about hundred troops (he went in with something like thousand). Nice one-shot.
The winter went away, now it rains and temperature is above freezing. It seems like it's March, not the end of December. I liked the winter better, but it might as well be summer soon, as Christmas is over.
Wednesday, December 24th, 2003
Merry Christmas to everybody!
Lasu writes in his log how IRC would be a very interesting study object. He seems to have talked with Hanna about the same subjects I have been thinking about for a couple of years. I have been interested in languages for quite a long time, and studying the IRC would be very interesting. Other chats could be interesting, too, but they are quite different. Writing even a non-scientific article about IRC and perhaps other chats would be very good thing, in my opinion, as it could tell the non IRC people what the whole thing is about. I think the Finnish language teachers in basic schools should be taught this form of language, as their students use it more and more regularily, and there can be difficulties communicating. Parents, too, might find a good guide useful. Of course, study just in the cause of study is also very interesting. :)
Also, the social aspect of IRC is strange: it seems that almost all of my friends chat on IRC nowadays, I have lost many of the people who don't, or don't do that on same channels as I do. This is kind of sad, but I still seem to have a quite large circle of friends with whom I talk almost every day. This probably wouldn't be possible the same way without IRC, so I think this is probably a good thing.
Of course I have other friends, but communicating with them is a bit harder. I don't know if this is good or bad, I wouldn't have time for meeting much more people...
It became a proper winter here. There's snow and it's 11 below zero (Celcius), so it's a proper Christmas weather. I won't notice the forecasts for +4 degrees and rain for tomorrow.
Sunday, December 21st, 2003
Well, the vacation began. On Friday our volleyball was cancelled, so I just came home and played with my computer, installing the new Linux kernel 2.6.0. On Saturday I got the right module loaded for the soundcard and now I can play music on this system. Hooray for me. :)
Kristel and Teemu went away for the weekend, they visited Teemu's parents in Seinäjoki. The house felt empty, even though we spent most of Saturday first visiting my parents (borrowing the car, but also seeing my mother, who had injured her eye with a paper bag on Friday. Not very nice. :( ), then going to celebrate Anna's second Master's degree and after that going to Mirva's family's pre-Christmas party. All these were nice, but I was quite exhausted after them.
I really noticed that we have been with Mirva for quite a long time: the oldest of her cousins' children are eleven years old. When we started dating they were something like four years old, and they seem to have grown up very fast. Probably I'm just getting old. Managed not to ask them how old they now are and such, I was always very annoyed when somebody asked me that when I was a child.
Today we played Magic the Gathering here. We had an eight person tournament. This was a Type 1 retro (last set we use is Weatherlight) as an Iron man game, that is, every card sent to the graveyard is out from the game for the rest of the tournament. The game was quite different than regular MtG, and the decks were quite large. I had something like 150 cards, and was down to about 95 after the games. In retrospect I probably could have fared better with fewer cards, but I was still fifth. My first opponent was Tane and he first countered my first Shivan Dragon and then Mind Warped the second from my hand. As I had three of them in the beginning, my attack power was diminished quite a bit. Still, I managed to win occosional games and even two matches with red X burn. I had almost every red burn card in my deck, and with Manaflares they proved to be very good.
All in all, a nice start for the vacation.
Thursday, December 18th, 2003
I feel like I could use a vacation. During daylight hours I am just at work, and I can't seem to do anything during weekends, I just wake up late and walk sleepily through the days. My two weeks of winter vacation begin tomorrow, but I have been too unproductive at work and I should get something concrete done tomorrow. I don't know whether I can, as I probably should write down what to do after the vacation.
The sword course is nearing its end. On Tuesday I found out that there is no class on 23rd of December, which is quite bad, because I can't make it to other classes that week, and I feel in need of training. I still seem to make the same mistakes as always, with the added bonus of not knowing where my sword is. I didn't go to today's training, as I wanted to be home and do nothing.
I wonder how many will complete the course, and how many will continue. There were 20 people on the course when it started, but last Tuesday in our group there were seven people and just two in the late night group. It would probably have been very useful to stay for the second class, but I just wanted to go home.
Small but good things in life: I found out today that Estrella makes small bags of chips (hm, I can't remember what the things are called in English), just 100 grams. The trend has been to put the things in larger and larger bags, and a 250 gram bag is usually too big for me. I had to buy a bag of these just for support.
Hm, strange, I should probably think more of the variant of English I'm using here. I would like to write British English, but I feel that the American words come out more easily. Bad culture colonialism, or something. "Chips" is probably the American word, as in "fish and chips" the chips are not the flakey kind.
Other good things: I have been writing a small roleplaying campaign, and I'm hoping to start it in January. I need to define some things during the winter and draw some maps, but the basic premise is there, and main plot is so complete that I might not want to do much more until I see who is going to play and what they will do.
Some information about the campaign: the characters are the crew, or the officers (the word isn't quite the proper one), on a "ship" flying through ether. Think more of the ethereal plane of AD&D than the ether in our space. Also, the ship is not quite a ship, but more of a flying house. The idea might seem something like the Umbra of Mage, but it isn't. I got the original idea there, though.
So, more on that hopefully in January.
Sunday, December 14th, 2003
Yesterday's party at Talo was very nice, I had much fun. The film we watched with Tane and Mikko before the party was also fun, although it probably wasn't fun in the way it was meant to. We watched the movie "Kiss and the phantom of the park", which, quite frankly, is very bad. The idea of making a film about a band and giving them superpowers is so far-out that I can't see why they did the film. Still, if you like Kiss and bad movies, you might like it.
On Friday I was at Lasu's with a couple of people trying to critizise each other's photographs. It was a good idea, and I had a good time, and got good comments on my two photographs. Still, it was hard to comment other photographs. I know what I like and what I don't like, but trying to discern why I do that and putting it into words is much harder. I'm looking forward to the next time we do this, probably in January.
Thursday, December 11th, 2003
I realized in the morning that in yesterday's entry I used the phrase "small girl" about a grown-up woman. Then I thought that maybe I was just using the viewpoint of the men at the fair, but then again, probably not. I wouldn't call a boy of that age a boy, so might as well try not girling women.
This all, of course, makes me a very much better person and saves the world and stuff. Especially writing about it here...
I realized other things, too. I like to write. This diary clearly gives me some reason to write regularily, and I find myself enjoying it. The point of the whole diary was in the beginning more like "let's see if I can write something", but yesterday I was delighted that I can write my rants somewhere and not just rant them at my housemates.
I don't know if that is a good reason to keep a web diary. Works for me, at least...
Wednesday, December 10th, 2003
Long, but nice day at work. I got my program in somewhat working condition and there was a long meeting with people from Tuorla observatory. We are doing much work with them on active galactic nuclei research, and it was good to hear what other people are doing. There are so many interesting things going on, and I really should get my thesis done to be rid of it, then I might start thinking of doing PhD next.
There have a few articles about computer games in newspapers and in the yellow papers. Yesterday I was browsing the web version of the worse yellow paper here in Finland and read an article about new console games and how they were made more interesting to women. Nothing wrong with that in principle, although I think a good game is a good game, and that does not depend so much on the sex of the player. But. In this article they said that dance and exercise games are more appealing to women because they can calculate the calories spent during the game. Hello?! (Rant follows.) What are they saying? Women game only because they want to lose weight? Even though the paper is a very bad one, people still read it quite much, it wouldn't be displayed on every corner otherwise, and even though people know (or they should know...) that the paper is rubbish, this still gives the idea that women should try to lose weigth as their main purpose in life. I wouldn't rant so much, but I know many perfectly fine and beautiful women who have a trauma about their looks and think they should lose weigth and have more muscles and, well, be more beautiful. My friends are (usually) a very sensible bunch of people, and I don't want to think what this kind of rubbish does to teenagers and other not so sensible people. With all the talk about too sexy clothes for children going on, I would like to have public conversation about other things affecting people's self image.
Of course, the point of the story might be just to annoy people. Still, it just reinforces my decision never to spend any money on the yellow papers. Well, I do read the (free) Web versions quite often, so I might see the ads there, which is probably their point.
This rant was probably caused more than a little bit by a book called "Pilluparvi" in Finnish (the original book is Swedish, by the name "Fittstim", I don't know if it has been translated to other languages). In it a couple of dozen women tell about their experiences about sex, boys and what expectations they have to fill to be good women. The book was good, but I didn't like the things it said. I like to think of myself as a good person and I try to treat people the same no matter who they are, but I still say and do things to women I wouldn't do to men - and which I wouldn't like being the target of. I could do without doing that, so I will try it. The problem is, many other people won't. There have been discussions with my friends about the male dominance in different organizations, mainly in the academic world, and it seems that there is still quite a few people, mainly older men, who don't like women doing research or technic things. I once said that I haven't seen much discrimination at the University of Technology or in my jobs, but then one coworker told of her experiences at her school and at a professional fair. I was quite shocked that a small red-haired girl was not taken seriously at all at the fair - the people (well, the men) at the stands told her to go away in quite blunt terms. No wonder girls won't think of technical careers. It seems that the discrimination is hard to see when you are not discriminated against.
I don't know if my point came clear from the preceding text, but I just had to rant somewhere. Don't know if it really changes anything, as the people who read this are probably my friends who think quite alike. I should probably rant somewhere more public... Today I thought of writing a book on the values of our society, this might be a good thing to include. I got the original thought when we were discussing the funding of quasar research in Finland. I won't go into details, but the money isn't quite flowing in. The main idea was that a prosperous society can (in my opinion) spend its money on seemingly frivolous stuff with no economic benefit, but it seems that Finland is too poor to do that - although there aren't that many richer countries.
Enough of ranting for one day there. I first thought of writing also about today's article about computer games in Helsingin Sanomat, but I think more opportunities for ranting about gaming being just for children and not for adults at all are probably going to present themselves before Christmas. So, that rant will have to wait for a little while.
Something is also good: we invited our parents and siblings here for Christmas, and Mirva and Kristel planned what foods we should ask people to make and how to do sleeping arrangements and how to accommodate about 15 people to our house for a Christmas meal. I think this is going to be good, although my parents and my brother are probably going to whine a bit about being with just the family. Still, I think they are going to come here and like the people. I somehow miss the Christmases(?) of my childhood. We went to my father's parents' a few times and usually there were all the siblings and their children and other relatives, too. As we don't have any children and we don't see our relatives much nowadays, Christmas is usually just the nuclear family thing, well, with Mirva's and my parents and siblings, but still without the feeling of a large crowd. So, this Christmas is going to be something different, but still much of the same.
Sunday, December 7th, 2003
A relaxing weekend. I have just played Grim Fandango and lazed around.
Also, I put some fotographs I have taken since the summer on the web. It's quite a chore to categorize the pictures, and even to sort them out. Perhaps I need a good scheme for that.
Friday, December 5th, 2003
I solved the problem at work on Thursday. The problem was that the simulation used native IRIX tools to compile a library, and then tried to run an utility called ranlib on the library file. After that linking to the library didn't work. After almost three days of looking at logs and compiling the library on different computers, I discovered that the ranlib which was run was GNU ranlib, which didn't work well with native tools. The problem was solved by setting RANLIB=echo before the compilation.
It's difficult to know what different versions of programs with same names do. I am used to using just the GNU programs while programming, as I have Linux at home, and they are the "native" ones there. But when I use some other Unix-like system, the tools work differently, and this is a problem. I don't know a good solution.
After I fixed the problem, almost everybody else had already left work. I stayed there for an hour, didn't do anything much useful, and then went home. I didn't stay there for long, though, as it was time for our workplace's pre-Christmas party. The party was actually the opera La Traviata at the Finnish National Opera. I have seen only Aida before, and didn't like that much, so La Traviata was a positive experience. The music was good, the singers knew how to sing and the subtitles provided much unintended humor. They were a bit laconic as the texts were quite short, but the performers sang for quite a bit saying the same thing.
The food afterwards was good, although expensive, and the portions were a bit smallish for my taste. Well, that's what you can expect in a fine restaurant, so no harm done. The conversation was a bit forced at first, but then mood lightened and fun was had. Not spectacularily so, but still enough to call the night a definite success.
Today's sword class was fun, too. We did the first drill, and I took Tanda as my partner. He is very good at teaching swordsmanship, and he pointed out and corrected many of my mistakes. This was the first time somebody actually told me how to do a proper point-down defense. Not that I can do it, but at least now I know what I should do. Also, I need to correct the same things I have been doing wrong for quite a while: too long steps, my feet cross, and I anticipate too much. (There are many others, of course.) I seem to have gained some strength or at least control of my muscles, the sword I was using didn't feel as heavy as on Tuesday.
Right now I'm drinking champagne. We have had a bottle in our fridge since we moved here, we have no idea whose it is, and it's a good occasion to drink it now: Kristel seems to be pregnant. At least, the pregnancy test said so, and proper tests need to be done, but there's a definite possibility of our house having a baby next summer. It's certainly not going to be easy, and I'm more than a bit afraid, but I'm expecting much fun, too. And educating experiences...
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2003
Much too unproductive two days at work. I have been trying to compile the Planck simulation, and I am having trouble with a library coming with it. Tomorrow I have to email some people who might know something about it.
Yesterday's sword class was good, I hadn't been to the classes since last Tuesday. We learnt the basic positions of the Fiore unarmed combat and they seemed kind of logical. Also, we to got our first pair exercise with swords: the beginning of the second drill, contrary to tradition. That was good, too, although I got a partner who was way too fast with his sword, and I was genuinely afraid. It showed on my face, too, as many people commented... He didn't slow down when people, including me and some free scholars as assistant teachers told him to, which wasn't very nice. I got away without him touching me, but he hit my sword once, "just because he could". Didn't feel nice, but didn't say anything during the course, don't know why.
After the class, Spider (who was on her first class after something like 18-month break :) got me to a bar. We went to the Pullman Bar at the main Helsinki Railway Station, and met there Jukka and some narrator of Helsinki Camarilla chronicle there, don't remember her name. It was nice talking with these people. I don't know them well, and it was nice to get to know them a bit better.
Monday, December 1st, 2003
Last weekend was nice. On Friday Tane came over to play some Magic, and we at last got to try our decks from the last retro games head-on. The games were even slower than we thought, I had a white-blue Millstone deck, which most of the time just waited and occasionally Millstoned, when it had mana. Tane played a blue-green thingie, which was a bit lacking in the killing department. He still won first two games, the second one just on his last turn - he drew his last card from the deck on that turn, but then his Polar Kraken walked over me. I trimmed my deck for the third game, and it seemed to work better, and I won the last game after Tane kindly played Prosperity and I got mine and then decked him. I played in the last tournament with 79 cards, which is way too big. We taught Teemu some MtG, too, and played with other decks, but that wasn't as nice, as the other decks varied much in power.
On Saturday there were two parties, which we missed as I was feeling quite tired and felt like being home. I played with my new computer and prepared for today's AD&D session.
Which we didn't have. On Sunday I felt a bit ill and was a bit warm - no real fever, but I had no lust to go outside. So, we stayed home for Mirva's birthday. In the afternoon our (mine and Mirva's) parents and siblings came to visit, and Kristel's father came, too. I had just dozed off the whole day, Mirva had prepared wondrous delicacies and so we ate ourselves full. Much fun, a lot of people (no way we could have matching crockery for 13 people :), and leftovers.
So, today I was feeling still a bit ill in the morning so I decided to stay home and try to work. Didn't work, just couldn't concentrate in the morning and after Mirva left for school, I got on the couch and slept for a few hours. I had to cancel the game due to the lack of concentration. Pity, now the next available time seems to be sometime during Christmas time.